"Renzo Piano" is the most comprehensive and updated work on this widely influential architect to date. In a strictly autobiographical book, Renzo Piano offers a very thorough assessment of each of his architectural projects, presented in a chronological order. He looks back over the principal stages in their development: how ideas were born, how they were influenced by their sites and earlier experiences; what materials were used and why; the people involved including clients, specialists, workers and artists. The story unfolds through anecdotes that have stuck in his memory, his impressions, his reflections.
He takes us through his early experiences devoted principally to research in the field of structure and new materials, such as a plant for the extraction of sulphur in Pomezia, Rome; the "Beaubourg" adventure and the difficulty of coming up with a response to the problem posed by the competition for the Centre Georges Pompidou: a radically new kind of cultural centre that would attract without intimidating people from all over the world; his great airport of Osaka in Japan, built on an artificial island to handle 100,000 passengers a day, and the new and most recent challenge, the skyscraper in Sydney Bay, Australia, built for offices and appartments, situated in the middle of the city on the edge of a park - designed to allow sunlight to reach to plants below - just a few steps from the remarkable Opera House. Fifty eight projects are described in all, 22 of the most significant are accompanied by exhaustive technical descriptions. Extensive use of colour, over a thousand illustrations including photographs, drawings and sketches, captions - long and short - and an informative body of text, permit the book to be read by a wide-ranging audience.
The book will accompany the exhibition by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop that will travel around the world from January 1997, visiting Bonn, Naples, Lyons, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney and the USA.