Forum A+P 08

of his works confirm his place in the annals
of architecture history, and the future holds
even greater promise.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
applauds Renzo Piano’s work in redefining
modern and post-modern architecture. His
interventions, contributions, and continued
explorations to solve contemporary problems
in a technological age, add to the definition
of the art of architecture.
Italy is like no other in the world, with its
great swaths of blue sky interrupting the
usual monotony of stadia seating.
His versatility is displayed further in such
projects as the beautiful sweep of a nearly
one thousand foot long bridge that curves
across Ushibuka Bay in Southern Japan;
again with the design of a 70,000-ton luxury
ocean liner; an automobile; and with his own
hillside-hugging transparent workshop. All
Biography
Renzo Piano is a man whose work is
reinventing architecture in projects scattered
around the world—from a Mixed Use Tower
in Sydney, Australia to the mile-long Kansai
Air Terminal on a man-made island in
Osaka Bay, Japan to the master plan for the
reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin
or the Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel,
Switzerland. Even this skip around the globe
does not indicate the full range or enormous
output of this prodigious architect. Renzo
Piano’s projects include not only buildings
that range from homes to apartments, offices
to shopping centers, museums, factories,
workshops and studios, airline and railway
terminals, expositions, theatres and churches;
but also bridges, ships, boats, and cars, as well
as city planning projects, major renovations
and reconstructions, and even television star
of a program on architecture.
He was born into a family of builders
in Genoa, Italy in 1937. His grandfather,
his father, four uncles and a brother were all
contractors, and he admits, he should have
been one too, but instead chose architecture.
Piano declares his architecture has an
important legacy—a passion for construction,
or more pointedly, a culture of doing, resulting
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