“In architecture, you should live for 150 years because you have to learn in the first 75 years,” Renzo Piano. 

Renzo Piano sees architecture as being on the frontier between art and science, guided by the steady hand of a chameleon builder.

“At 10 o’clock in the morning, you need to be a poet,” he explained. “But at 11, you must become a humanist, otherwise you'd lose your direction. And at noon, you absolutely need to be a builder… because architecture, at the end, is the art of making buildings.”

Renzo is seen as a true superhero in Italy where he is now focused on a pro bono project to rebuild the country’s city suburbs and mentor a new generation of architects. Their joint mission is to ‘mend a suburb’, one Italian community at a time.
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Renzo Piano is also hailed internationally as a genius and rewarded with the highest honors in his profession, although critics haven’t always been so kind to the Italian architect.

Renzo’s high-tech Centre Pompidou in Paris was dismissed as an ‘oil refinery’ when it opened in 1977 (critics now describe it as a ‘much-loved landmark’) and London’s spiky Shard skyscraper was once called ‘a stab in the heart’ of the city. Renzo’s New York Whitney Museum has been described as an ‘an ’awkward hulk’ but Manhattan has happily embraced it as one of their own.
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Growing up in Italy during WWII

Renzo Piano was born in 1937 at a time of tremendous turmoil in Italy. Fascist Benito Mussolini ruled Italy and Hitler was in power in Germany. Renzo was a toddler when the war began. The Allies pummeled his hometown of Genoa, bombing from the air and sea to demolish Italy’s largest port.

In the closing days of the war in 1945, German troops blew up large sections of Genoa’s breakwater and laid 140 mines in the harbor. Renzo found comfort in the moviehouse and watching the waves. “From where I stood, there were two avenues of escape, two frontiers to cross - the sea and the cinema.” 

When the war was finally behind them, Italy was left to dig itself out of the rubble. More than 11,000 of Genoa’s buildings were damaged or destroyed along with much of the city’s cultural heritage. Renzo and his family would help revive and restore the city’s grandeur. His father, grandfather, and elder brothers were all builders.

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“I grew up after the war with this unforgettable feeling that making buildings was pure magic because from around the age of seven I’d go to my father’s building site and sit on the sand to watch them work,” he told the Financial Times. “When you grow up this way, you don’t worry too much about what you will do in your life - it is pretty clear. It’s in the blood.”

He soon began to appreciate that buildings were the antithesis of destruction, even a gesture of peace.

Renzo Piano: The genius architect emerges 

At 18, Renzo announced he wanted to be an architect, which puzzled his father. Why wouldn’t Renzo want to be a builder? “The builder was God in my family,” Renzo said, but he was determined to design as well as build. He had a fascination with public buildings where he believes people discover tolerance and enjoy diversity: “Being born in the war, in time you grow up with this idea.”

His father built simple, massive buildings with concrete, he said: “So, as you do when you’re 18 or 19 years old, I set out in exactly the opposite direction.”

Franco Albini, a product designer as well as architect, was one of his professors in Florence, a mentor who also became his first employer. Albini taught Renzo about eliminating the unessential. Renzo also broadened his horizons by working for two international firms, the modernist architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and for the Polish engineer Zygmunt Stanisław Makowski in London where Renzo found his confidence.

“When I started out in Italy I was thought of as more of a plumber or washing machine mechanic than an architect. Or perhaps this is what I imagined other people thought. But when I went to London, to the AA (Architectural Association) in the late ‘60s, to my surprise I was taken seriously.”

He received his first international commission for the Pavilion of Italian Industry for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan in 1970. He collaborated with his brother Ermanno, by then running the family’s building firm. British architect Richard Rogers admired Renzo's work and the two architects decided to open their own firm, Piano and Rogers, where they worked together from 1971 to 1977 when the Centre Pompidou was completed.

Centre Pompidou‍

The Centre Pompidou was -and still is - an iconic museum that provoked conversations worldwide about modern architecture. As usual, some critics pounced, however.

‍Art Review’s ​​Kevin Power labeled it ‘a dystopian art supermarket’ but Marina Vaizey called it an ‘innovative oddity’ and ‘a genuinely astonishing building’, while reminding readers: “The French, we may recollect, didn’t much like the Eiffel Tower when it first loomed up.”

Francesco Dal Co, an architectural history professor and author of Centre Pompidou, described Renzo’s building as an inspiration to numerous cultural centers.

The essential architect‍

The ethos of a small family-run business never really left the architect even as he gained international acclaim. Renzo split with Rogers and took on various projects in Italy - including revitalizing Genoa’s one-bombed port, transforming it from a rundown industrial area into a cultural center and tourist attraction.

He established the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and his popularity and reputation grew quickly.

The architect has a very specific approach to his work. It’s driven by the philosophy that nothing should surpass the needs of the everyday person or the feel of the local community.

“The places talk - they always say something, but you have to shut up and you have to listen," he said during a speech at John Hopkins University. 
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Disappointments

Renzo’s projects haven’t always met with success or acclaim, of course.

He backed away from an 80-story office tower in Boston over ‘creative differences’ and objections from preservationists. He also shelved plans for a 72-story building in London over concerns that it would overpower the neighborhood. His plans for the City Gates and Opera House in Malta were met with criticism in some quarters but Renzo takes it all in stride.

“As an architect, you cannot be so arrogant as to say you are 100% sure about what you do.” 

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Renzo Piano’s Legacy‍

Now in his 80s, Renzo has built the Renzo Piano Foundation to support up-and-coming architects, but he’s also giving back to the community. His G124 initiative has been ongoing for more than five years and he personally funds it. Renzo donates his salary as an Italian ‘senator for life’ to pay young architects to revitalize Italian suburban areas.

Not everyone likes change, however, so the regeneration projects involve community groups and local politicians in the decision-making, even if it’s difficult for them to understand the vision. The G124 team also works with sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and urban planners. So far, more than a dozen suburbs have been transformed.

An abandoned viaduct in northeast Rome was turned into a cultural hot-spot, for example. The G124 team used recycled materials to create a community space with shipping containers that could be used to host events and workshops. Old tires were repurposed into creative furniture and recycled materials were made into art installations to clean up the neighborhood and keep costs down. By all accounts, the G124 initiative is a success, both professionally and personally for Italy’s star architect.

“The great projects of our country are the suburbs: the city that will be, the city that we will leave to our children.”