La Chambre Des Reines

"Renzo Piano is an absolute master of light and lightness. He has a fantastic understanding of construction and the scale of pieces. I don't think there is anybody like him." - Richard Rogers -

Some of Piano's famous buildings

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Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

"Piano has moved on from the massive machine—like the Pompidou Center in Paris, which we designed together and which is full of people, like a big climbing frame—to very beautiful museums and libraries. Each one is a bit more elegant." - Richard Rogers -

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The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, US

What I'm interested in is "doing architecture."

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Foundation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel, Switzerland

"A museum should attempt to interpret the quality of the collection and define its relationship with the outside world. This means taking an active, but not an aggressive role."

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NeMo National Center for Sience and Technology, Amsterdam, Netherlands

 "A museum is a place where one should lose one's head; and I hope you will lose it.”

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Scale model for the Tjibaou Cultural Center, Noumea, New Caledonia

"It dawned on me that one of the fundamental alements of Kanak architecture is the very construction process: "building the house" is every bit as important as "the finished house". From this I began to develop the concept of a permanent "building work-site" or rather of a place which would suggest an unfinished house building project."

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Reconstruction of the Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, Germany

 

 

**Renzo Piano is a world renowned Italian architect and Pritzker Architecture Prize winner. He was born into a family of builders in Genoa, Italy in 1937. His grandfather, his father, four uncles and brother were all contractors. He graduated from the school for Architecture, Milan Polytechnic in 1964 and subsequently worked with his father and later under the design guidance of Franco Albini, one of the most important Italian "Neo-Rationalist" designers.

Piano has a long interest in elegantly expressed structure. He first achieved international fame for the Centre George Pompidou in Paris completed in 1978, a collaborative effort with another young architect from England, Richard Rogers. 

Since then, Piano has gone on to higher critical acclaim for a much wider range of building types with greater diversity and subtlety,that include among many others, the Menil Museum and its Cy Twombly addition in Houston, Beyeler Museum in Basel, Switzerland, The Tjibaou Cultural Center in Noumea, New Caladonia  and the reconstruction of the Potzdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany.

Source: Wikipedia, Pritzkerprize.com

For Renzo Piano's biography

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