Meet Renzo Piano, one of the original starchitects

The title of his practice is the Renzo Piano Building Workshop: a name that emphasises the intimacy of craftsmanship, materials, and making. Yet Renzo Piano and his firm have designed billion-pound ventures, defining capital cities at historical junctures. The Potsdamer Platz redevelopment (2000), located on the former border between East and West Berlin, covers 68,000 sq m, contains 19 new buildings and ten new streets. One half was office space, the other included 600 apartments, two cinema complexes, a theatre, a casino, 120 shops, and over 20 restaurants and bars. He delivered similar, huge plans in his native Genoa and the bay of Osaka. Is it possible for a single architect to design at that scale and to govern the quality and craft?

Renzo Piano: the man behind the studio

Piano has a highly rare set of skills and understandings that make this apparently impossible contradiction of contemporary architecture possible. Famously, his father was a builder (Piano was born in 1937 in Genoa), but as he himself has added, ‘everyone was – and is – a builder in my family.’ His understanding of materials, traditional ones like wood and stone, is exceptional; his sympathy for how steel and glass can be engineered over wide expanses in subtle rhythms is unparalleled. Nor is it innate.

Wishing to distance himself from the heavy stone structures his father built, he visited London as a student in the 1960s to learn from the Polish innovator of lightweight steel space frame structures, Zygmunt Makowski. From 1965 to 1970, he worked for Louis Kahn, a maker of monumental work in brick and concrete that also managed to be human-scale. He sought out the best.

Renzo Piano’s modernist roots

Piano’s pupilage is almost a who’s who of modernist architecture giants. He worked under Jean Prouvé, who once said, ‘I am not an architect, I am not an engineer. I am a factory worker.’ It is perhaps from the French modernist that Piano learned how to adapt industrial processes towards high-end construction; to find the craft in building. Tellingly, Prouvé, as well as an early employer, was a key juror for the Centre Pompidou competition, which Piano won alongside Richard Rogers, producing a building that radically overthrew the established hierarchies in architecture: service shafts streaming over the façade, the inside overtook the outside. We look at Pompidou and see the tics of Rogers’ later work, but if we look closer, we see one of the key aspects of Piano’s work: the importance of what is variously called the piece or the module.

Piano’s signature use of modules and light

It is a repeated component – industrially made but to a high specification – which distils the structural and architectural intention of the building into a simple form. (Piano is clearly a fan of the sculptor Brancusi, who reduced his subjects to essential gestures or figures.) At Pompidou (1977), it is the gerberette and pin joint detail: a device that carries the floorplate and connects it both to a column and the external frame, dispersing the load. The module is a leitmotif, and often modulates light. For the Hermès store (2006) in Tokyo, it is the glass block, 13,000 of them that sheath the building, producing at night a magic lantern effect that glows warmly across Ginza. Less well heralded is the beautiful natural interior light that the store enjoys during the day, striking a contrast to the heavily lit neighbouring stores, soothing the eyes of visitors. Piano, a Mediterranean man, understands the humanising qualities of just the right amount and quality of light.

In other places, particularly highly specialised art museums, like the Beyeler Foundation Museum (1997) in Switzerland or The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2003), the components are more complex, but still the means of diffusing natural light, often from above. In Beyeler, the module is a vertical armature that at its base and its head holds angled panes of glass. In Dallas, the component is a small die-cast aluminium scallop (repeated 223,020 times) which only allows a diffused northern light to filter through to the space below. For The New York Times Tower (2007), the module is the horizontal ceramic tubes that wrap the building, giving it a tactile quality and reconciling the transparent steel and glass building to its masonry context. The module reconciles the engineering of the building with its character, its structure with its surface.

A balanced architecture of contradiction

These are the means by which the contradictions inherent in the name Renzo Piano Building Workshop don’t collapse: how he can build at scale and retain the craft of building making. In Kansai International Airport (1994), we see best how Piano can make the megastructure an exercise in craft. The form of the terminal is created with his long-term engineer collaborator Peter Rice, from asymmetrically arched trusses that span a massive 80m, rising forward to face the airside, and rolling down to the landside. Cleverly, these arched trusses gradually decrease in height toward the building’s outer edges. The subtle inflexion in the structure means that as you move through it, you can sense the difference, feel where you are in the building. Whereas his contemporary Norman Foster celebrates homogeneous space – big volumes that are epic, belittling – Piano is always trying to humanise it with scale, make it changeable.

Perhaps Piano’s greatest capacity for craft, though, is the hardest for the contemporary architect: scale. One of the issues of building in the modern world is that while we can produce detailed renderings so we have a good idea of what a building will look like. We can only guess, though, at the impression that a truly massive building will have on a city. The Shard (2012) in London is the tallest building in Western Europe, rising up from a largely Victorian city. During the planning stages, Piano spoke of Canaletto’s paintings of London and how The Shard would seem like a spire of gold. It sounded like moonshine, and yet there it is. It is a testament to Piano’s singular understanding that the craft of conceiving architecture is only a prelude to the building.

Renzo Piano: 9 key projects

Centre Georges Pompidou (with Richard Rogers)

When: 1971-1977
Where: Paris, France