It hasn’t been easy for Piano to shake the notoriety of his most famous building. He was little known in 1971 when he and British architect Richard Rogers won the competition to build the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; their boisterous design, with its brightly painted tangle of exposed ducts, pipes and skeleton, was the ultimate expression of a building as a machine. After that, the label of high tech stuck. But, insists Piano, “it doesn’t fit me. It implies that you aren’t thinking in a poetic way.”
No wonder he chafes at the term: high tech has come to mean a heartless, icy esthetic. But Piano is a humanist techie-he embraces both the aspirations of modernism and the spirit of his Renaissance forebears. For him, technology is a means as well as an end-but never just a “look.” He doesn’t have a signature style. “Having a style is not bad,” he says, “but it can be a golden cage.”
Piano’s show isn’t just the usual display of models and drawings but a plunge into the design process. Visitors can sit at one of the long, maple worktables and pore through photographs, computer images and prototypes of construction components to understand the evolution of a design. It’s a striking introduction to the firm’s diversity. Take the Menil Collection, the museum for Dominique de Menil’s extraordinary art collection. Unlike the brash Pompidou, the Menil museum, opened in 1987, is calm and light, clad in gray clapboards to fit into its suburban neighborhood. But what it shares with other Piano projects are specially designed technological elements, exposed to reveal the architectural intent. In the exhibition, you can see how the Piano workshop devised roof panels for the Menil-long, elegantly curved “leaves” made of ferrocement (a reinforced cement)-and suspended them like louvers from a web of trusses so sunlight could filter in between. There’s a piece of the triangular truss in the show, actual size.
The process of design is one of invention and experimentation. Piano, says critic Peter Buchanan, who wrote the terrific catalog for the show, is “an entirely instinctual rather than intellectual designer.” His instincts were shaped early. Now 55, he was born in Genoa, the son of a builder, and grew up around construction sites. For him, architecture is the most human of activities-it isn’t sketching or theorizing but building. “I love to touch materials,” he says. “The workshop is not a place where we draw, but where we think about things, invent things, make things.” An elegant, amiable northern Italian whose style is more tweedy than Armani, Piano seemed to inspire a recession-weary New York design crowd in a recent lecture. “Connecting the work of the mind with the work of the hands is very much what we do,” he said.
“I see no contradiction between art and science,” says Piano. To bridge the two, Piano has worked closely with gifted engineers (especially the late Peter Rice) and borrows from other technologies. The Menil ferrocement was a material he’d used to build a yacht for himself; he and Rice once designed a prototype plastic car for Fiat. Like the great Renaissance architects, he simply uses the best technology of his time. “Brunelleschi didn’t only design a building and the construction and the structure,” he says, “but even the tools.”
In the late ’60s, Piano worked for Louis Kahn, but where Kahn’s architecture is about massiveness and monumentality, Piano strives for lightness. In his design for the 1990 World Cup soccer stadium near Bari, Italy, he even tried to bring a sense of lightness to a usually brutal building type: the stadium is broken into huge, curved petals of concrete that cantilever out, each supported by just four columns. The structure almost seems to float.
Piano argues, too, that technology isn’t alien to nature but is part of nature. Nowhere is that idea being put to a harsher test than in the amazing plans for the Kansai airport-starting with the man-made island on which the terminal will sit. The terminal’s curved form-it’s a bird! it’s a wave! it’s a dune!-was generated by computer. Nearly a mile long, the terminal will have a pair of wings extending out to the boarding gates. The whole project, slated to be finished in 1997, is a technological wonder. Consider just one aspect: because the landfill island is slowly settling, the airport construction has to be supported by a system of 900 jacks.
If Kansai seems to propel the Piano workshop into the future, the studio also looks to the past. A spectacular proposal for the church of Padre Pio in southern Italy-a huge sunflower of an amphitheater for 10,000 pilgrims-calls for arches with a 167-foot span (a little bigger than St. Peter’s). They will be made of stone, like a Gothic cathedral, because stone touches “the collective memory of people,” says Piano. And the design for the arts center in New Caledonia is downright romantic in its curved, husklike forms, evoking the shape of local native huts.
But it is in urban design that Piano is perhaps best at marrying his contemporary sensibility with the poetry of memory. For last year’s Columbus commemoration, the Piano workshop renovated part of Genoa’s old port. In Turin, the firm is rehabilitating the fabulous 1925 Lingotto Fiat factory, a structure a third of a mile long, with an auto test track on the roof. Piano won the commission with his proposal for a lively, urbanistic mix within the vast space: a concert hall, shops, a hotel and laboratories. “It’s like the model for a town,” he says. Already an exhibition space has opened at Lingotto, with the typical Piano kit of specially designed structural parts. Now the studio has won the biggest plum in urban design: to reinvent the Potsdamer Platz, the once throbbing center of Berlin which was bombed by the Allies and then sheared in half by the wall.
The historic heart of Berlin is a long way from the Pompidou, but it’s no accident that a futuristic architect of the ’70s is now turning his attention to urban design. Using the language of technology as well as history, rebuilding cities will probably be the most important design task of the 21st century. The ideas of architects like Piano, that neither bulldoze the past nor freeze-dry history, are likely to be the only way to give cities new life and meaning.
