Jonathan Morrison
Renzo Piano: ‘My new bridge in Genoa could trigger a renaissance’
The great architect, creator of the Shard, reveals his plan to replace the fallen bridge as he is celebrated at the Royal Academy
When a 200m section of the 1960s Morandi motorway bridge in Genoa collapsed on August 14, killing 43 people and making about 600 homeless, there was one man that the government was always likely to turn to for advice: Renzo Piano, the architect of the Shard in London and Pompidou Centre in Paris, senator for life in the Italian parliament, and arguably the city’s most famous son after Christopher Columbus.
The search for survivors has ended, the inquiry into who is to blame — shoddy maintenance, mafia or corruption, even the engineer Riccardo Morandi’s original calculations — will most likely rumble on for many years, but rebuilding the span, a key link in Italy’s vital coastal A10 motorway, is increasingly urgent.
So it was with palpable relief that Giovanni Toti, the regional governor, “gladly accepted” Piano’s offer of a new design on Wednesday: an elegant steel suspension bridge built across piers resembling the prows of ships — inspired by the port city’s maritime heritage and Piano’s passion for the sea — and hung from 43 tall posts, whose cables will form the shape of sails.
“Since it happened I have had a cloud following me,” Piano, 80, says. “It broke the city into two pieces. So I’m ready to work to give them a new bridge and not just a bridge: a new area around it. At my age, I’m not going to design everything myself, but I will bring the idea of a bridge and the city can run competitions for the urban design. As a senator, it’s my duty to help.
“The bridge falling was a disaster, but the reconstruction can be a positive moment for the city. Building is a gesture of peace and solidarity. It’s one of the best ways to create pride. Something that terrible cannot be forgotten, but a new bridge, conveying ideas of sobriety and truth and strength, can be a symbol and the trigger for a renaissance. This is what I feel.”
Piano, who lives with his second wife, Milly, and has four adult children, splits his time between a house built on a hillside at the far end of Genoa, and Paris, where his main office is located and the project that first propelled him to international recognition — the Pompidou Centre, designed in 1971 in collaboration with Lord Rogers — continues to attract millions of visitors. There is also an office in the US, where he has just completed the vertiginous glass headquarters of The New York Times and where work on a new £300 million museum for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, of Oscars fame, is proceeding apace in Los Angeles.
He says he “feels at home everywhere I’ve made a building”, yet it is difficult to imagine the wiry Piano being more at ease in America or France; in Genoa, his house and studio, which cascades down an old basil field once owned by his brother, command impressive views over the bay and towards the red cranes of Italy’s largest port, a significant part of which he rebuilt in the 1990s. Every day Piano collects a picture of the shifting light and seascape. And every year Piano takes to the waves for three weeks at a time on his yacht, working on a selection of new projects in his customary green ink while listening to “the sounds and voices in the water”. He recalls falling in love with the warm ochre stones of the old city, where his father was a builder, but knowing that, like any Genoese boy, “the sea is infinite and one day I would have to go and see what was beyond it”.
It is a poetic explanation for a peripatetic career that has taken Piano from Milan to Massachusetts, from Santander to Seoul, via a Pritzker prize and AIA gold medal, and which is to be the subject of a timely retrospective at the Royal Academy in the spectacular new galleries created by Sir David Chipperfield. It will be the first of a series of annual architecture exhibitions and took four years to commission.
The Centro Botin, Santander (ENRICO CANO)
A central room will feature a specially created 15m sq island with scale models of 100 of his best-known buildings — a vast corpus by any measure — while a film by Thomas Riedelsheimer will introduce the prolific Mr Piano, with his easy smile, tan and twinkle, and begin to unravel his creative process, which he often likens to an iceberg, since so much of the work remains unseen. He has his tricks and shortcuts, though. “Whenever I get a difficult client, I hand him the pen and tell them to draw,” he says. “They usually hand it straight back.”
On either side, there is space to study 16 seminal projects in sublime detail, eight in each room, through huge sketches, intricate models and careful photography; they range from the incredible Kansai airport built on an artificial island off the coast of Japan, to the still controversial Shard, to the subtle Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia, which is built largely of wood and quite unlike anything else in his oeuvre.
Starting with the Pompidou, which opened in 1977 and was selected from 681 competition entries (it was the only one to feature a public piazza — something Piano took from Genoa) and stretching to last year’s Centro de Botin in Spain and a half-finished pro-bono hospital in Uganda, they tell the remarkable story of how architecture has developed over the past half-century. The show explores how architecture has embraced steel and glass and what is sometimes labelled “high-tech” and sometimes “structural expression” in preference to heavy modernism, brutalism and concrete, and left the world around us looking like it does — although it must be said that the pragmatic Piano is notable for the diversity of his creations and does not hold to a rigid style.
Of course, he has not been without his critics, not least over the Pompidou; the revolutionary design — one that almost literally turned architecture inside out — prompted Le Figaro to declare that the city was about to get a monster to rival the one in Loch Ness, while the prominent air intakes had to be hidden until the prefect of Paris, an implacable opponent, died (they were installed the next day). Over here, the 305m-tall Shard went through 18 months of public inquiry before John Prescott gave it the go-ahead, and there were hard battles fought over his proposal for a “Paddington Cube” on the other side of central London, now under construction. “You need stubbornness to keep going,” he says.
Yet as the exhibition shows, perhaps no single architect has had more impact than Piano on the modern city centre — not even his contemporaries Lord Foster and Lord Rogers — or left more of a legacy. Nowadays, he can afford to turn down work, but remains the go-to guy for museums and prominent civic and cultural projects, such as the recent Stavros Niarchos Foundation centre in Athens, even if he chafes at the term “starchitect”. “Starchitect is an insult,” he says. “I know I am a member of the tribe, but it implies a frivolity, narcissism. And that’s not true.”
Why hold the exhibition in London? Well, there’s a symmetry to that too. No matter that Rogers and Piano remain firm friends from their Pompidou days — calling each other for a chat three times a week and staying in each other’s houses — or that Piano lived in London between 1966 and 1971, in the epicentre of the swinging Sixties, teaching at the Architectural Association (AA) for two years when it was considered radical. The real connection is that the first two exhibitions of his work were held here; as a young unknown architect in 1967 at the Centre for Advanced Study of Science in Art, then 18 months later at the AA, when he had begun to establish a reputation.
Piano’s sketch of the Whitney Museum of American Art (RPBW)
What does it mean to him to be celebrated once more — and at the Royal Academy, the omphalos of the artistic establishment, where he was elected an honorary member in 2007?
“There’s an element of satisfaction for the work done,” he says. “I’m surprised to be 80 and surprised to be able to look back, as even a modest craftsman can look back — not with arrogance or nostalgia — at what they have created, and say this shows continuity and coherence and integrity. It preserves what I call the fils rouge — the red thread — running through everything.
“I grew up believing I could change the world, but what I’ve been able to contribute are ‘drops’. Yet drops matter; in the right place they can do a lot. So that’s what I still feel I can do as an architect and senator — drops. And the new bridge will be another of those.”
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