To understand Renzo Piano’s five-decade-long career, we need to examine his remarkably fluid journey from architectural rebel to cultural establishment go-to man. The bearded provocateur who experimented with movable structures in the 1960s and, with Richard Rogers, inserted a colorful Tinkertoy in the staid center of Paris in the 1970s has evolved into the trusted hand of museum boards and corporate clients. His work no longer challenges the way we view architecture or topples established notions of design, but it impresses us with its refinement and its elegant solutions to the everyday problems of building.
Born in 1937 to a family of builders and contractors, Piano, Hon. FAIA, rejected his father’s trade to study architecture at Milan Polytechnic. He remembers his father asking him, “Why become an architect when you can be a builder?” After earning his degree in 1964, he worked for his father in Genoa under the guidance of the Neo-Rationalist Franco Albini, then spent the rest of the decade abroad in the offices of Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and Z.S. Makowsky in London.
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