A tension runs through the work of acclaimed Italian architect Renzo Piano. Born in 1937 to a Genoese family of prominent builders, he has long stressed his commitment to craft—to the particularities of material and making—and, though his firm has multiple offices with international projects, it is still called Renzo Piano Building Workshop.1 On the other hand, Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971–77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with such large urban schemes as the redevelopment of the old harbor in Genoa (1985–1992) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992–98), as well as such massive infrastructural projects as Kansai International Airport (1988–94), for which an entire island was engineered into being in the Bay of Osaka (no less than 6,000 workers labored over three years).
Another version of this tension is that, despite the persona of the modest craftsman, Piano is the favored architect of many high-class institutions, cultural, academic, and corporate. Among his buildings in the first category are the Menil Collection in Houston (1982–87), an exquisite museum that distinguished the more classical Piano from the more Pop Rogers; the Beyeler Museum in Basel (1991–97) and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (1999–2003), two more elegant temples devoted to private art collections; the Niccolò Paganini Auditorium in Parma (1997–2001) and the Parco della Musica in Rome (1994–2002), the former a converted factory, the latter an original complex of three lead-clad auditoria; the Paul Klee Museum in Bern (1999–2006) and the Morgan Library extension in New York (2000–06); new wings for the High Museum in Atlanta (1999–2005), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2003–08), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1999–2009); and still to come, among other such projects, are makeovers of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, as well as an annex for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. So, too, in the academic category Piano has schemes underway for such universities as Columbia, Harvard, and Michigan. His fifty-two-story tower for the New York Times on Fortieth Street and Eighth Avenue was completed in 2007, and his California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which boasts an undulating roof with turf and skylights, was finished in 2008—and these are just two of his many corporate-institutional jobs of late. That Piano has four major projects in Manhattan alone—a new campus for Columbia to come uptown, the Times tower and the Morgan complex completed in midtown, and a satellite for the Whitney to appear in Chelsea—is extraordinary: When was the last time one office had so many important pieces on the Monopoly board? Even his London Bridge Tower—if built, this 305-meter glass spire will be the tallest office building in Europe—looks like a World Trade Center scheme that, fed up with the delay in Lower Manhattan, moved from the Hudson to the Thames.
Kansai International Airport, 1988–94. Photo © Kawatetsu.
Beyeler Museum, Basel, 1991–97. Photo © Christian Richters.
Clearly, Renzo Piano Building Workshop delivers a design profile that speaks to different elites; in this respect its success, if not its size, recalls that of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in the postwar heyday of late modern architecture as a dominant establishment style. What is it that makes Piano so attractive? Much of his allure lies precisely in his ability to mediate the tension between the local craft of building and the global enterprise of big business. Piano does so, on the one hand, through a refined use of materials (sometimes as traditional as wood and stone), which helps to ground his buildings in particular sites, and, on the other hand, through a suave display of engineering (often in light metals and ceramics), which serves to associate his designs with the contemporary world of advanced technology.
New York Times Building, 2000–07. Photo © Michel Denance.
These poles of the practice were already present in its beginnings: in the middle to late 1960s Piano worked briefly in Philadelphia for the American architect Louis Kahn, long celebrated for his tactile and tectonic expression of materials, as well as in London with the Polish engineer Zygmunt Makowski, who was innovative in structures and skins supported by their own tension. Another key mentor was the French designer Jean Prouvé, with whom the peripatetic Piano studied in Paris. From his sculptural collaborations with Constantin Brancusi, through his furniture designs, to his modular schemes for colonial housing, Prouvé was adept at smooth combinations of the traditional and the technological—he possessed the kind of finesse now associated with Piano—and, as a member of the jury that awarded the Pompidou commission, Prouvé was instrumental to Piano in other ways, too. Finally, it was on the Pompidou project that Piano first worked closely with the Irish engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup & Partners.2 In fact, after Piano and Rogers separated in 1978, Piano teamed with Rice, and, though they parted in 1981, Rice consulted for the office until his untimely death in 1992.
With such influences and interests, Piano was in the thick of progressive architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, during which time he experimented with temporary structures, exhibition spaces, and free-plan housing. In his embrace of clean design and smart engineering, Piano was associated not only with Rogers but with Norman Foster (with whom Rogers partnered before he teamed with Piano). All three young architects sought a way beyond modern architecture that would both realize its economic efficiencies and extend its technical advances. To this end they were inspired by the more visionary engineering of Buckminster Fuller as well as by the more practical Californian modernism of Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and other designers of the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles. However, by the late 1970s Piano, Rogers, and Foster had diverged. Piano was never so Pop as Rogers nor so high-tech as Foster, and his signature device came to differ as well: whereas Rogers continues to experiment with circulation systems pushed to the exterior (as at the Pompidou), and Foster with great spans of open space (as at the Stansted terminal), Piano is still guided by his distinctive notion of “the piece.”
“The piece” is a repeated component of a building, often a structural element such as a joint or a truss, which Piano exposes to view in a way that offers a sense of the construction of the whole; to this extent it seems to partake of the modernist principle of tectonic transparency. Even when the piece is more about appearance than about structure, it still lends a specific character to the building, which it often helps to scale vis-à-vis the site, too. The exemplary instances in the Piano oeuvre are the modular trusses and leaves (in cast iron and ferro-cement) that comprise the roof of the Menil Collection. Key to the special quality of this celebrated museum, these elements do several things at once: they allow us to see into its structural support and to sense its spatial ordering, they filter the strong light of Houston into its galleries, and they cover the colonnade of its exterior, which in turn connects the building to its setting—to both the large verandas typical of Southern homes and the Greek Revival style favored in civic structures in the United States. For architectural writer Patrick Buchanan, this use of the piece is characteristic of Piano in general, whose “art” he sees as one of “fitting in” and “fitting together.”3 However, other examples of the piece—from the massive cast-steel braces on the façades of the Pompidou to the light ceramic scrims on the sides of the Times tower—might not seem so fitting: the Pompidou ties are so big as to be brutal, while the Times tubes are so fine as to be precious (especially in the gritty context of Forty-Second Street).4 Nevertheless, in these instances, too, the pieces lend the buildings either a tectonic clarity or a tactile quality that they would not otherwise possess. And sometimes the piece has a metaphoric significance as well: for example, the eighty-three-meter arches that support the curved roof of the Kansai terminal serve to underscore the experience at hand, that of winged flight, but do so in a way that is not too manipulative.
Menil Collection, Houston, 1982–87. Photo © Richard Bryant.
Like any device, however, the piece has its weaknesses, as even advocates of Piano acknowledge. Due to his insistence on these exposed components, “the complexity” of his buildings tends to “come from the skin,” architectural writer Philip Jodidio admits, and they are “usually far more distinctive in section than in plan,” Buchanan adds—which is to suggest that the articulation of space and/or the development of program sometimes appears secondary in Piano.5 If this is a liability, it might be due to the very facility with which he reconciles two preoccupations that are often at odds—a concern with structure, pronounced in modern architecture, and a concern with surface, paramount in postmodern architecture. For better or worse, Piano suggests a third way: an evocation of structure on the surface of his buildings, that is, in effect, an evocation of structure as skin or decoration—and sometimes, given his close attention to light effects, as atmosphere, too.6 But then in these cases it is not clear how tectonic, or even functional, such “structure” is; as Buchanan suggests, Piano sometimes treats technology as a leitmotif. One thinks immediately of the famous I-beams that Mies van der Rohe applied to the façades of his Seagram Building (1958) in New York (among other buildings), which are not structural at all. Piano is inclined to this kind of Miesian finesse, in which architectural transparency seems to be affirmed, only to be made a little faux.
Here, the device of the piece appears in a new light. For Buchanan, these components are often possessed of “a sense of aliveness” that “elicits empathetic identification”; they are “almost … beings in themselves.”7 This response is quite different from the rational understanding usually associated with architectural transparency; in fact it is close to fetishization, understood as the investment of an inanimate thing with an animate presence or power. As frequently in fetishization, a rhetoric of the natural, especially of the natural charged with the technological, follows: for Buchanan, Piano has created an “organic architecture,” and among the pieces of evidence offered are the leaf motif of the Menil Collection, the toroidal shape of the Kansai terminal (“the torus is the most common geometrical figure found in nature”), and the sail forms that recur in his work (an avid sailor, Piano has designed two cruise ships and four sailboats).8 Of course, architectural discourse is steeped in natural analogies (witness the old myth that the first building was a “primitive hut” with proto-classical columns derived from tree trunks), and these analogies have always served not only to naturalize architectural form but to idealize it as well. The modern master of such rhetoric is Le Corbusier, who argued that certain products of industry had developed as if by natural selection—a claim that made them appear necessary, too—and liked to compare luxury machines of the time with the Parthenon (his example was a Delage sports car). Similarly, Buchanan sees “natural evolution” at work in the Piano pieces, which are also said to combine “the efficiency of a machine and the integrity of the organism,” and an abstracted classicism runs through his work from the Menil Collection through the Morgan Library and beyond.9
“The lesson of the machine lies in the pure relationship of cause and effect,” Le Corbusier wrote in Decorative Art of Today (1925). “Purity, economy, the reach of wisdom. A new desire: an aesthetic of purity, of precision, of expressive relationships setting in motion the mathematical mechanisms of our spirit: a spectacle and a cosmogony.”10 There is little here that does not speak to Piano: often in his architecture, too, the principle of transparency shades into “an aesthetic of purity,” in which a fusion of the organic, the mechanical, and the classical is essayed, and “technology” is indeed treated as a “leitmotif.” In Decorative Art Le Corbusier looked to the machine as the austere basis of a new kind of ornament, one that would differ from the stylish compromises with industrial production offered by Art Deco. Yet his own fusion of the organic, the mechanical, and the classical also worked to reconcile—to gloss over—the contradictory demands of the technological and the traditional. This note of an Architecture Deco is present in Piano as well, perhaps because, like Le Corbusier, he, too, operates at a time when such contradictory demands are especially insistent—not only between local building and global business, but also between traditional materials and digital techniques. Here his connection to Prouvé is again pertinent, as is his affinity for Brancusi (Piano designed the Brancusi Atelier adjacent to the Pompidou)—they both produced compromises between the technological and the traditional that are at once beautiful and occlusive.
At moments in Le Corbusier, the pressure of such contradictions pushed his “aesthetic of purity” to the point of outright fetishization. Here he is in the same passage from Decorative Art quoted above:
The machine brings before us shining disks, spheres, and cylinders of polished steel, shaped with a theoretical precision and exactitude which can never be seen in nature itself. Our senses are moved, at the same time as our heart recalls from its stock of memories the disks and spheres of the gods of Egypt and the Congo. Geometry and gods sit side by side! Man pauses before the machine, and the beast and the divine in him there eat their fill.
This paean is close to delirious, but then 1925 was the high point of Parisian primitivism à la Josephine Baker, and Le Corbusier did eat his fill. Piano is never so extreme, yet sometimes his exquisite designs also disclose a fetishistic side. Consider his Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia (1991–98), the distinctive feature of which is a fine series of ten pavilions with curved walls in wood slats that range from nine to twenty-eight meters in height. Disposed as if in a stately village, the pavilions evoke nearby huts, palm trees, and sails all at once, as well as the traditional basketwork and rooftop fetishes of the local culture; at the same time the Center is a state-of-the-art design expressive of the “light modernity that Piano has long favored.”11 For Piano enthusiasts the result is a successful negotiation of the local and the global; for others it might evoke a contemporary version of primitivist Deco, as though a village were first simulated, then abstracted, and finally sized to the scale of a theme park.12
Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center, New Caledonia, 1991–98. Photo © Pierre-Alain Pantz.
The notion of a “light modernity” is suggestive here. “There is one theme that is very important for me,” Piano remarks, “lightness (and obviously not in reference only to the physical mass of objects).”13 He traces this preoccupation from his early experiments with “weightless structures” to his continued investigations of “immaterial elements” like wind and illumination.14 Indeed, lightness is the message of his primal scene as a designer, a childhood memory of an awning of sheets billowing in the breeze on a Genoese rooftop, a vision that conjures up the shapely beauty of both classical drapery and contemporary sailboats as architectural ideals. For Piano, lightness is thus a value that bears on the human as well as on the architectural: it concerns graceful comportment in both realms. As a practical imperative, lightness confirms the drive, already strong in modern architecture, toward the refinement of materials and techniques, but now this refinement seems pledged less to healthy, open spaces and transparent, rational structures, as it was (at least in principle) in modern design, than to decorous touches and atmospheric effects—to an aesthetic value in its own right. A light architecture, then, is a sublimated architecture, one that is particularly fitting (that word again) for art museums and the like. (Often the light effects in such spaces appear so beautifully natural that one might fail to notice that they are produced by costly filtering systems in elaborately louvered ceilings.)
The importance of lightness to recent design was signaled in a 1995 exhibition called “Light Construction” at the Museum of Modern Art, where Piano was represented by his Kansai terminal.15 The curator of the show, Terence Riley, took his cue from another Italian, Italo Calvino, who in his last book, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1993), proclaimed the special virtues of lightness for the new age: “I look to science,” Calvino wrote, “to nourish my visions in which all heaviness disappears.”16 The attraction of this old dream of disembodiment is clear enough, but, viewed suspiciously, it is little more than the technological fantasy of dematerialization retooled for a cyberspatial era, and it has become a familiar ideologeme to us all—though it might seem odd that architecture, long deemed the most material of the arts, would wish to advance it.17 Viewed even more suspiciously, this lightness is bound up not only with the fantasy of human disembodiment but also with the fact of social derealization. In his 1984 novel about the unreal life of Communist Czechoslovakia—a life saturated with Party ideology that no one believed, a condition that Peter Sloterdijk has taught us to see as “cynical reason”—Milan Kundera coined the phrase “the lightness of being.”18 This kind of lightness is no ideal at all; it is “unbearable,” and since the fall of the Berlin Wall the capitalist version of this derealization has become the state of many more of us. Perhaps, in the end, the two notions of lightness—the dream of disembodiment and the nightmare of derealization—must be thought together dialectically (that is, if dialectics has not suffered its own final lightening, as many now think).
For his advocates, the lightness featured in Piano is driven by historical necessity as well as by technological advance. In fact Buchanan offers a fanciful story of a pseudo-Hegelian Geist that has passed from the massive forms of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (ziggurats and pyramids), through the “colonnaded edifices” of classical “Mediterranean cultures,” to the abstract “grids” of modern “Atlantic culture” (“in which nature is enmeshed by the grasp of reason and technology”), and on now to a “Pacific cultural ecology” where, in the hands of designers like Piano, “the lines of the grid will etherealize into intangible conduits of energy and information, or take tactile biomorphic form.”19 For his part, Piano states simply that the Pacific is “a culture of lightness,” and that he prefers it to others: “Although I grew up in Europe, I feel much closer to the Pacific, where lightness, or the wind, is much more durable than stone.”20 Yet his version of the Pacific is still European, indeed Mediterranean, only repositioned and updated, which is to say that, as in Hegel, a classical bias underwrites the benign story of historical passage here. This classicism points to another affinity with Corb and Mies (not to mention Adolf Loos and others) whose “aesthetic of purity” also harbored such a bias, and in fact Piano scarcely conceals this fact: his museums in particular are like abstract descendants of classical temples.21
Perhaps this beatific notion of a “light modernity” must be viewed dialectically—countered, say, with the less sanguine notions of a “liquid modernity” and a “second modernity” proposed by the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck, respectively. Bauman calls our present stage of modernity liquid because the force of capital that courses through it is so powerful as to uproot any other social formation or economic mode in its way and carry them along in its flow (the fantastic vision of “all that is solid melts into air” in The Communist Manifesto becomes more actual all the time).22 If an architectural image of this condition were needed, one candidate might be the Maison Hermès in Tokyo (1998–2001) that Piano faced in glass blocks which do indeed appear liquid: here the “floating world” of Edo meets the floating world of capital today. For his part, Beck deems modernity to be in a second stage because it has become reflexive, concerned to modernize its own old industrial infrastructure.23 This notion is also suggestive vis-à-vis Piano: like other major architects, he is often commissioned to convert old industrial structures (his Paganini auditorium was once a sugar factory), indeed entire industrial sites, in ways that are appropriate for a postindustrial economy of service and sport, culture and entertainment (his Genoa harbor includes an aquarium and a glass sphere with the largest collection of ferns in the world). In this regard, the most telling example is the Piano makeover of the Fiat Lingotto Factory in Turin (1983–2002). Designed by the engineer Giacomo Mattè Trucco in the late 1910s, this large structure, complete with a test-track for new cars on its roof, is an icon of modern architecture: Le Corbusier concluded Toward an Architecture (1923) with images of the track, and Reyner Banham hailed it in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) as “the most nearly Futurist building ever built.”24 Piano has fitted this old factory, which remains the headquarters of Fiat, with a helicopter pad, a glass bubble conference room for company directors, and a private museum for the Agnelli art collection on the roof, while below there is a concert hall, an exhibition space, a cinema, a university branch, and a shopping center.
Maison Hermès, Tokyo, 1998–2001. Photo © Michel Denance.
In our modernity, structures for performance and show are much in demand, as are stadia for sport and entertainment, as well as the usual malls, office towers, banks, and business complexes; and, like his peers Rogers and Foster, Piano is involved in all these categories. In an economy desperate to sustain consumer spending, display remains all-important, and here architecture often serves as both stager and staged, both the setting for fine commodities and the fairest commodity of them all. Yet new infrastructure is also imperative, especially for transport, and designers like Piano are at work in this area as well, with innovative airports, train stations, and subway systems. Much of this infrastructure remains regional in scope, but some is global (for example, Kansai Airport is hardly for Osaka alone). If modern architecture was “the international style,” then such neo-modern architecture must count as “the global style,” and, like the second modernity that it serves, it often exceeds national containers. At the same time, such design still needs a trace of the local in order for its buildings to appear grounded; in fact these traces rise in value, as do any vestiges of the past (as Rem Koolhaas likes to say, there is not enough past to go around, and so its aura continues to skyrocket). Frequently, then, local reference appears in global architecture precisely as a souvenir of the old culture, a token at a remove, a mythical sign: hence the allusion to the floating world in the Hermès store in Tokyo, the village huts in the cultural center in New Caledonia, the spire in the tower planned for London, and so on.
Lingotto Factory conversion, Turin, 1983–2002. Photo © Shunji Ishida.
Art Institute of Chicago, 1999–2009. Photo © Nic Lehoux.
Beck calls this phenomenon “banal cosmopolitanism,” and, like Rogers and Foster, Piano is adept at its architectural expression. This problematic aspect of global style might prove to be a deadly counter to the “critical regionalism” once posed by Kenneth Frampton in resistance to such “universal civilization.”25 Dedicated to a “poetics of construction,” Frampton wants to see a critical moment in the Piano piece, which is said to mediate between the local and the global without capitulation to the conservative tendency of the former or the capitalist rationality of the latter. Yet, as Piano has developed, the piece has become less a resistant element, grounded in material and making, than another affective token or atmospheric effect in a world of banal cosmopolitanism—one that, again, remains classical in essence. In this regard lightness appears able to sublimate not only material nature but historical culture as well, and here fetishization is once more at work. Apparently it, too, can operate at a global scale.