Questo sito utilizza cookie tecnici, analytics e di terze parti.
Proseguendo nella navigazione accetti l'utilizzo dei cookie.

Preferenze cookies

Renzo Piano Before Renzo Piano

Presentation of the book by Lorenzo Ciccarelli
The author will be in conversation with Thomas Weaver

This book explores Renzo Piano’s formative years, before the major achievement of the Centre Pompidou. The striking success of an architect little more than thirty years old in the famous 1971 international competition has long tended to eclipse his previous experience, which is fundamental to understanding the genesis not only of the Beaubourg but all Piano’s subsequent work. The dense ramifications of his experience, spreading in many different directions, have now finally been retraced by Lorenzo Ciccarelli, the first scholar to have access to the archives of the Renzo Piano Foundation.

Immediately after graduating, Piano built a series of radical and innovative experimental structures, combining his mastery of prefabrication with an instinctive interest in industrial design. The roofs built out of pyramidal elements (1964-1965) and inflatable components (1966); a building to house his family’s construction company (1966-1968); his shell structures (1966-1968); his own office building at Erzelli (1968-1969); and the pavilion of Italian industry at the Osaka Expo (1969-1970): these were some of the prototypes in which Piano developed the design strategies and construction techniques that would characterise the Centre Pompidou and the celebrated masterpieces of later decades. They were constructional experiments that revealed the teachings the youthful Piano had absorbed from his masters in Italy (Franco Albini, Marco Zanuso, Giuseppe Ciribini) and abroad (Jean Prouvé, Louis Kahn, Zygmunt Makowski and Robert Le Ricolais).

The last part of the account deals with his partnership with Richard Rogers, the ‘elder brother’ who introduced Piano to the British context. Together with Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, he devised the competition entry for the Centre Pompidou.

[BOOK NOW]


Lorenzo Ciccarelli
holds a BSc degree from the Università Politecnica delle Marche and a PhD from the Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’. He is currently adjunct professor of Architectural History at the Università degli Studi in Florence and since 2013 has worked with the Renzo Piano Foundation. His studies are devoted to the often ignored or misunderstood ties between Italian architecture and European and North American architecture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He has given papers on these subjects to international conferences in Chicago and Paris, and published essays in ‘Arquitectura Viva’, ‘Construction History’, ‘Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica’ and ‘L’industria delle costruzioni’. He recently published the Guida all’architettura nelle Marche 1900-2015.

Thomas Weaver is an architectural writer, teacher and editor. He has taught architectural history at Princeton University, architectural design at Cooper Union, New York, and has also acted as editor of ‘ANY’ magazine and various architectural monographs. From 2007 to 2018 he has worked at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, where he managed all of the AA’s publications, including editing the long-running journal ‘AA Files’.

 

  • Organizzato da: ICI London