Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano (1937-) is the most important and best-known Italian archistar. The list of his achievements is endless: second (and last) Italian to win the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious international award for architecture (1998), gold medal at the American Institute of Architects (2008), senator in Life of the Republic (since 2013), and much more. Protagonist of a career studded with great successes, Renzo Piano leads through his Renzo Piano Building Workshop what is still the largest Italian studio in terms of volume and value of the projects carried out, operating on all five continents. The RPBW is based in Paris and in Genoa, Piano's birthplace, from which he embarked on a long journey that passed through an apprenticeship in the studios of Franco Albini, Louis Khan and Jean Prouvé before finding enormous international fame with the Center Pompidou project in Paris, created together with his friend and colleague Richard Rogers, which immediately became an emblem of high tech architecture, arousing discussions and controversies among purists but also great admiration all over the world. Numerous projects will then follow over the years in which Piano will be able to express both his attention to innovative construction detail and his innate ability to create buildings that are at the same time real stories, immediately iconic and identifiable, such as the skyscraper The Shard of London, the New York Times Building, the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, the Aquarium of Genoa and many others. His interventions in the field of product design are rare, achieved in particular through special collaborations with Fontana Arte and Riva 1920. In his youth, he also signed the headquarters of B&B Italia, in which he experimented with forms and techniques that he would then lead to maturation in the project of the Center Pompidou.