9 Buildings You Need to Know by Renzo Piano
Photo: Fernand Ivaldi / Getty Images1/9Pritzker Prize–winning Italian architect Renzo Piano started his career working with architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. In the 1970s he joined forces with Richard Rogers, creating the astonishing Centre Pompidou in Paris, which challenged architectural conventions of the time. A decade later Piano founded his own firm, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which maintains offices in Paris, New York, and Genoa, Italy. At the head of this firm the architect has unveiled a string of high-profile projects, including the New York Times Building in Manhattan, the Shard in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, all of which are praised for their forward-thinking forms.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris—designed in the 1970s by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini—garnered much attention for its high-tech style. Its color-coded, tubular façade (green pipes are plumbing, blue ducts are climate control, electrical wires are yellow), with an elevator that climbs in diagonals up the front, looks straight out of Super Mario Land.
Photo: Lee F. Mindel2/9In May 2015 New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—previously located in a Marcel Breuer building on the Upper East Side—moved into a Piano-designed structure in the Meatpacking District. The nine-story, column-free building is known for its four terraces with astounding views of Lower Manhattan and its pale-blue steel, shiplike façade.
Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik / Getty Images3/9The steel-framed skyscraper in midtown Manhattan west that houses the New York Times was completed in 2007, the seventh-tallest building in the U.S.
Photo: Cecilia Helsing / Alamy Stock Photo4/9The Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome comprises three halls of differing sizes and an open-air amphitheater. The distinctive, shell-like structures are defined by their pre-oxidized lead roofs.
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Photo: Richard Seymour / Getty Images5/9London’s energy-efficient Shard—a 95-story pyramidal tower that resembles a shard of glass—emerges from the River Thames as the tallest building in the European Union.
Photo: Idealink Photography / Alamy Stock Photo6/9The Zentrum Paul Klee—which houses more than 4,000 works by the German-Swiss artist—features an undulating silhouette of steel beams that almost blends into the rolling hills surrounding it outside Bern, Switzerland.
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Photo: Pawel Libera Images / Alamy Stock Photo7/9The Central St. Giles Court in London features a façade made with steel, glass, and vibrant tiles of glazed terra-cotta cast with a crosshatch pattern.
Photo: Franz Marc Frei / Getty Images8/9In the Modern Wing Piano created for the Art Institute of Chicago, a glass-and-metal striated façade references the city’s skyline, while solid limestone walls nod to the museum’s past.
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Photo: Michel Denancé9/9Home to the Hermès flagship store in Japan, Maison Hermès features a façade made entirely of glass blocks. During the day, the blocks entice customers with a softly blurred view of the goods offered within, and at night, they let light filter outward like a giant Japanese lantern.
