Renzo Piano designed one of high-tech architecture's seminal buildings ? the Centre Pompidou. Continuing our high-tech architecture series, we profile the Italian architect who was a key figure in the largely British-led movement.
Piano would tell you that he doesn't have a signature style, that he finds the idea of it inhibiting. He likes to treat every project as a problem requiring its own practical solution.
However, there is no denying that, across his wide-ranging portfolio of projects, engineering and technology play an important part. As the architect of the Centre Pompidou he was a key figure within high-tech architecture, the style that emerged in the UK in the late 1960s and celebrates structural elements.
The Italian architect frequently names lightness and transparency as the most important qualities in his work, and these qualities often extend to the structural language. From the elegant, jagged form of The Shard to the floating roof of the Beyeler Foundation, elements are designed to appear both monumental and lightweight. Renzo Piano worked with Richard Rogers to design the Centre Pompidou. Image courtesy Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
There is an inherent pragmatism to his approach, indicative of a man for whom the building site was one of his first loves.
"I like the idea that architecture is made in such a way that you see the trace of your hands there," Piano said in a recent film produced by Thomas Riedelsheimer. "Even if you do ...