Jonathan Morrison
Renzo Piano: I’m still the bad boy of architecture at 79
The architect of the Shard on why it’s more important than ever that buildings stand tall
“I’m still a bad boy,” jokes Renzo Piano, the architect of the Shard in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He is relaxing in the spacious living room of Richard Rogers’ house on Royal Avenue in Chelsea, where the first thing that greets you inside the burglar-proof door is a full-length punchbag.
Rogers apparently still likes to bash the bag around, despite being 83. Piano’s collaborator on the iconoclastic Pompidou Centre, the project that propelled them from London academia to something approaching international superstardom, is also a bad boy, Piano says. It’s fair to say that the pair have come a long way: one a life senator in his native Italy, the other Lord Rogers of Riverside.
Piano’s Complete Logbook, republished by Thames & Hudson, lies shut on a glass table of Rogers’ design, multicoloured tabs climbing up the side like a cantilevered staircase. It’s the reason for the interview, but he will open it only once in nearly two hours of questioning. It’s a thick volume and a fascinating read, but would it have been half the size without one of the first projects pictured, the Pompidou? There were 681 entries to the international competition held in 1971 to design a new cultural centre for Paris; were he and Rogers simply lucky to win?
“We won because we didn’t try to win,” he explains. “We just wanted to make it clear that cultural buildings had to be different now — not stone, columns, steps, intimidation. Museums were not what they are today; they were for only a few people. So we created this funny spaceship to land in the middle of Paris, looking almost like a factory to produce culture.”
It was a battle to build such a revolutionary design — one that almost literally turned architecture inside out. Le Figaro declared that the city was about to get a monster to rival the one in Loch Ness and the prominent air intakes had to be hidden until the prefect of Paris, an implacable opponent, died (they were installed the next day). Piano is categorical, though; a few years after the riots of 1968, the authorities had to do something. The Pompidou Centre was as much about appeasing the students as it was about leaving a cultural legacy. Right time, right place, right building.
“Pompidou was a rebellion against a specific moment. We were living in a special atmosphere. It wasn’t trying to be controversial for the sake of being controversial, but came to represent a shift in culture. That is what good architecture should do; celebrate the moments when the world makes a change, when there’s a shift.”
Kansai international airport, which is built on an artificial island off Osaka in Japan
Immaculately dressed in a lime-green jumper and chinos, thin and tall with close-cropped white hair and beard, and designer glasses, it’s difficult to think of the affable Piano as combative, but some of his hardest battles have been fought on this side of the Channel. The 305m Shard — “a mad idea” — went through 18 months of public inquiry before John Prescott gave it the go-ahead. An attempt by Irvine Sellar, the recently deceased developer behind the Shard, to build another 72-storey tower in Paddington — Piano’s “Paddington Pole” — had to be withdrawn in the face of ferocious local opposition.
“I don’t know what was wrong, but if people don’t want it, then you have to understand that,” he says. “When it became clear that the community didn’t want it, then how could we insist? You can’t. When I understood that, I said ‘Fine. I am not going to insist.’
“Architecture is a job where you have an important civic responsibility. It’s not like writing a bad novel or making a bad painting that nobody sees. You better have a bit of humility and accept that critics are not useless. Critics are useful when they are irritating. You have to accept this. You are doing things that will stay there for ever.”
The designs for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
That is not quite the end of the story, however; Piano insists that his replacement design, labelled the “Paddington Cube”, will be going ahead. The £775 million scheme received planning permission in December, but was called in by Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, last month for further consideration. The “Cube” is on ice for now, but few would bet against Piano getting his way. You get the impression that this time he will insist.
Does he accept that he has made mistakes? He hoots with laughter. “It’s like committing suicide to tell you! Of course I’ve made mistakes. I won’t say which, but in everything you do, you’re never totally happy. There’s always something that tortures you. Something that’s missing. You have a dream of beauty that you will never reach. When you try to catch it, the arm is too short.”
There must be projects he is pleased with, though, in his sixth decade of practice — he was, after all, named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2006 (the tenth most influential in arts and entertainment) and won the Pritzker prize, the world’s foremost award for the profession, in 1998 (the citation compared him to Michelangelo). I suggest the incredible Kansai international airport, built on an artificial island off Osaka in Japan. Then his reconstruction of the port in his native city, Genoa, where he maintains an office (as well as one in his home city, Paris, and another in New York).
Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia, southwest Pacific (GETTY IMAGES)
I’m in the right area, just. He opens his book and extends a bony, sun-damaged finger to a picture of his latest boat. He has built one a decade since his twenties. “A sailing boat is perfection,” he says. He attributes his love of craftsmanship to growing up in a family of small builders, but blames the sea for his wanderlust: “If you grow up in a city of water — as a teen with exaggerated desires, it means freedom — you grow up with this idea to go away. I ran away as soon as possible.”
It turns out he is mostly joking about the boats. With four children, the youngest of whom, Giorgio, 17, seems to have run away when I arrive, he concedes that, with children and buildings, it is always the last one he cares about the most. “Not loves,” he clarifies, “but most concerned with.”
“I will be 80 in September,” he says. “You need a long life in architecture — you need joy and sadness and to experience all parts of life. You need all this to do a good building — I’m not sure I’ve done it yet. But then your best work is always the one you haven’t done yet.”
The Pompidou Centre in Paris, by Piano and Richard Rogers. Piano says of the 1971 competition to design it: “We won because we didn’t try to win”
This candour is endearing and a little surprising, but openness permeates Piano’s entire philosophy. Perhaps one of his most important interventions came in the aftermath of 9/11, when he was tasked with designing a new headquarters for TheNew York Times in Manhattan. He met the owners of the newspaper three days after the attack on the Twin Towers in a restaurant, on his birthday, and drew a glass skyscraper then and there.
“We wanted to express freedom and trust in the future,” he says. “It was a moment when the history of the world provides you with great inspiration. For years after [the attack] the discussion was about stopping tall buildings and creating bunkers instead and we did the opposite — made something that was transparent and had a sense of luminosity, even fragility. To do otherwise would be accepting the blackmail of terrorism.”
The same ethos drove his design for a new campus for Columbia University in west Harlem, New York, one of six university schemes he has on the go — “When we’re asked to do intelligent things, it’s very hard to say no.” He describes the decision to place the Manhattanville development in an area that is more than 75 per cent black and Hispanic as a “brave gesture”, but the right one. “Do you put it in a fake paradise or right where the energy is?” he asks.
Piano’s £775 million “Paddington Cube” scheme is on ice
He believes that the future development of cities will mostly take place in areas such as Harlem, areas he refers to as the peripheries, or, in an impeccable French accent, the “banlieue”. He is about to complete the Centro de Arte Botín, a cultural centre in Santander, Spain; a new home for the Academy, of Oscars fame, in Los Angeles; and a couple of towers, but one of the projects he is most proud of is his Palais de Justice, which will be finished within six months and is located in a rough part of Paris, north of the centre. It will bring 2,000 judges near to the people they will be sentencing.
“One of my passions is the periphery,” he says. “You have to bring civilisation and urbanity to harness the energy with public buildings, transport, schools. Otherwise it is just a place where people go to sleep and in the darkness you create monsters. What is dangerous is to forget these people and let the centres become surrounded by violence and hate.”
I suggest that if anyone can civilise the banlieues, it’s a bad boy, and he half agrees. “If you only do safe things then you are in trouble,” he says. But it’s the senator that is helping to “mend” these areas. It turns out that Piano uses his parliamentary salary to hire young architects and set them loose on a different district each year, most recently the district of Giambellino in southwest Milan. Why is it so important to him?
“If you look closely there is a fil rouge [common thread] connecting everything,” he concludes. “It may take 60 years to save the periphery, but there is so much energy there — not just bad, but good. Energy is energy and that’s what you need. People always ask what the future holds and I tell them: the future is there.”
Renzo’s five finest
1 Pompidou Centre (1971-77)
The building that made his name and created a new style of architecture labelled “high-tech”, the Pompidou Centre continues to prove popular with the citizens of Paris, typically attracting five times more visitors a day than it was designed to handle, or about 5.5 million a year.
2 Kansai international airport (1991-94)
Built on an artificial island by the port of Osaka, in an earthquake and typhoon-prone part of Japan, this project required some serious engineering know-how and became the model for other offshore airports, such as Hong Kong’s.
3 Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre (1991-98)
This hauntingly beautiful complex, made largely of wood, was based on the traditional huts of the Kanak people of New Caledonia and represents Piano at his most sympathetic.
4 Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (2012-16)
Combining the Greek National Library and a new opera house and elevated by an artificial hill, this cultural behemoth outside Athens has been described as a “modern-day acropolis”.
5 The Shard (2000-12)
Like it or loathe it, there are few places in London where you can escape it. According to Piano, it is intended to represent “the mast of a great ship” and was for some years the tallest building in Europe.
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