Renzo Piano

A builder's son in Genoa, 1937–1970

Renzo Piano was born in Genoa on 14 September 1937. His grandfather, his father, his four uncles and his brother were all builders, running the family firm Fratelli Piano. He grew up on building sites, and has said since that the experience of watching things get made, rather than drawn, is the foundation of how he works. It also explains his lifelong interest in the joint, the bracket and the piece of structure that can be seen doing its job.

He graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1964, worked for a time in his father's company, and served an apprenticeship with the Milanese architect Franco Albini. In the later 1960s he worked with the engineer Zygmunt Makowski in London and with the architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. His own early work was in lightweight structures and shells, testing how little material a building could stand up on.

Beaubourg, 1971: two unknown architects win Paris

In 1971 the French state ran an open international competition for a new cultural centre on the Plateau Beaubourg, a site in central Paris that had been used as a car park for thirty years. The project was launched under President Georges Pompidou. It drew 681 entries, and the jury, chaired by the engineer Jean Prouvé and including the architects Philip Johnson and Oscar Niemeyer, chose entry number 493 on 19 July 1971 by eight votes to one.

The entry came from Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, with the engineering firm Ove Arup and Partners, where Peter Rice led the work. Piano was thirty-three and Rogers thirty-seven, and neither had a building of any size behind him. The commission changed both their careers at a stroke.

Their idea was to clear the interior completely by pushing everything that normally clutters a building onto its outside. The structure, the lifts, the escalators, the air ducts and the pipes all hang on the façades, leaving floors of about 7,500 square metres with no internal columns. The services are colour-coded in the open: blue for air conditioning, green for water, yellow for electricity and red for movement, meaning the lifts and the escalator that climbs the front. The loads are carried on cast-steel brackets called gerberettes, named after the nineteenth-century German engineer Heinrich Gerber. They also gave up roughly half the site to make a sloping public piazza, which is the part of the scheme the city took to first.

The Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou opened on 31 January 1977 to hostile reviews. Le Figaro compared it to the Loch Ness monster. Parisians called it the refinery. Within a few years it was drawing more visitors than any other building in the city apart from the Eiffel Tower, and the argument about whether it was an eyesore quietly stopped mattering. It closed on 22 September 2025 for a five-year renovation by Moreau Kusunoki with Frida Escobedo Studio, and is due to reopen in 2030.

The other Paris buildings

Piano kept coming back to the same corner of Paris. IRCAM, the institute for music research that Pierre Boulez founded, was built underground beside the Pompidou as part of the original project. Piano added its brick tower at the end of the 1980s, so that the institute had a visible door.

In 1997 he designed the pavilion on the Pompidou piazza that houses the reconstructed studio of Constantin Brâncuși. The sculptor had left the entire contents of his workshop to the French state on condition that it be kept as he arranged it, and earlier reconstructions had not held. Piano's building gives the studio top light and puts the sculptures back in the positions Brâncuși left them in, which for this sculptor is not a detail: he composed his studio as a single work and photographed it obsessively.

The Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé opened at 73 avenue des Gobelins in 2014, a curved glass-and-metal form that visitors quickly named the armadillo. It sits behind the retained 1869 façade of a former theatre whose sculpted decoration is by Auguste Rodin, a fact recorded in the French heritage register. In 2017 he completed the Tribunal de Paris at Batignolles, the city's law courts, a stack of glass volumes stepping back as it rises.

Museums, and what he wants light to do

Piano has built more significant museums than any other architect of his generation, and the run began with a building that looks nothing like the Pompidou. The Menil Collection in Houston, finished in 1987, is a low grey building whose roof is made of curved concrete leaves that bounce daylight down onto the paintings without letting the sun touch them. The problem it solves has occupied him ever since. He wants galleries lit by real daylight, which changes through the day and the season, without the ultraviolet damage and the glare that daylight brings with it.

The list that followed is long. It includes the Beyeler Foundation at Riehen outside Basel (1997), the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2003), and the renovation of the Morgan Library in New York (2006). Then came the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (2008), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2015), the Centro Botín in Santander, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles (2021).

The rest of the practice's work ranges wider than museums. Kansai International Airport near Osaka (1994) sits on an artificial island in the sea. The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa, New Caledonia (1998), builds a set of tall curved timber cases that work with the Pacific wind and refer to Kanak building. The Shard in London (2012) is the tallest building in western Europe. In 2020 he designed the San Giorgio Bridge in Genoa, replacing the Morandi viaduct that had collapsed in his home city two years earlier and killed forty-three people.

The Workshop, the Pritzker, and the Senate

Piano worked in partnership with Richard Rogers as Piano and Rogers from 1971 to 1977, then with the engineer Peter Rice, and in 1981 founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which has its offices in Genoa and Paris. He calls it a workshop rather than a studio deliberately, which goes back to the building sites of his childhood.

He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1989 and the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998, the profession's highest honour. The Pritzker jury described a career that had produced buildings of great variety without settling into a signature style. On 30 August 2013 the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, appointed him a senator for life. Piano used the position and its salary to fund G124, a small team of young architects working on the repair of neglected Italian suburbs.