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"As a client, working with Renzo is a dream," said James Cuno, president of the Art Institute of Chicago, who has been a client of Piano's on the ongoing expansions of both the Art Institute and Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum. "He does not have a signature style, but instead responds to each project client, program, and site specifically. He is especially sensitive to the social and aesthetic conditions of art museums."

The Menil Collection Museum first secured Piano's reputation as an elite museum designer. He created a "nonmonumental space open to contact with nature, facilitating a direct and relaxed relationship between visitor and artifact," as Dean Hawkes and Wayne Forster wrote in Energy Efficient Buildings, excerpted in ArchitectureWeek No. 170.

The daylit gallery has become one of Piano's hallmarks. A common sense of ease, of structural lightness and connection with the outside, can belie the technical underpinnings of his designs.

For the Beyeler Foundation Museum, Piano worked with Arup engineers to develop a multilayer roof topped by a "layer of fritted glass brise-soleil inclined and positioned to prevent direct sun penetration during all museum opening times but also to maintain optimum admittance of diffused light," as explained by Hawkes and Forster.

The roofs of both the Nasher Center and the High Museum of Art expansion sport arrays of highly customized light scoops, designed by Piano and Arup engineers to provide modulated natural lighting for the exhibit spaces below. Texas entrepreneur Raymond Nasher had asked for a "roofless museum" to house his sculpture collection, and the design team succeeded in delivering "a sculpture garden and a building with a roof that's 'open' to the light of the sky," as described in ArchitectureWeek No. 185.

Piano's first project in New York City was the renovation and expansion of the Morgan Library, completed in 2006. The addition comprises a low-rise glass-and-steel building that joins the existing historic buildings, with underground storage areas below.

"My partners and I have been witness to a remarkable design process resulting in an extraordinary new landmark for New York City," says Richard W. Southwick, AIA, partner at Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP, the executive architect on the Morgan Library project. "Renzo has been a teacher and a critic along this journey."

Piano describes his design process in Paul Goldberger's introduction to Renzo Piano and Building Workshop: Buildings and Projects, 1971-1989, as quoted in the Great Buildings Collection:

"As you have said, I really interrogate myself and am always ready to receive. But invariably I cannot start a project from its theoretical framework and then work my way to the detail. I always follow a double process, I try to comprehend the ideological reasons for the project, what lies behind it, what constitutes its social and formal innovation, its functional requirements, the context within which one works with respect to fellow practitioners, and at the same time I find it difficult to divorce these issues from my initial design sketches on grubby bits of paper that I take everywhere, with designs of junctions, bolts, and the smallest details. I cannot separate the two. Normally I start at this level, where I have the excuse of artisan experimentation, which I greatly enjoy."

Piano's oeuvre also includes skyscrapers. The New York Times Tower, a project that RPBW designed in collaboration with FXFOWLE Architects, opened in 2007 as one of the tallest buildings in New York City. Another tower, nicknamed "The Shard" for its transparency and near-pyramidal form, is planned for London.

Among the firm's other ongoing works are housing projects in Lisbon and Rome; corporate headquarters in Turin, Italy; private homes in Aspen, Colorado, and Milan; and, not surprisingly, more museums.

Piano's new building for the California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, is due to open in September 2008. A 2.5-acre (one-hectare) "green roof" tops the transparent building, with built-in hills that accommodate interior programmatic functions. Piano has described the roof as “like lifting up a piece of the park and putting a building under it.” With 60,000 photovoltaic cells, 95-percent recycled steel, and extensive daylighting, the building is expected to receive a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.

RPBW's standard design process, for the Cal Academy project and elsewhere, includes the construction of mockups to test building systems and components — an expensive process that the firm considers essential, according to San Francisco Business Times, April 6-12, 2007.

Gordon Chong of Chong Partners Architecture (now part of Stantec Architecture), which is collaborating with Piano on the Cal Academy, said his firm's "culture of design and practice has been shaped and influenced by our collaboration."

At once a world architect, an artist-architect, and an architect's architect, Renzo Piano exemplifies the possibility of thinking locally while building globally, of fine-wrought craftsmanship in our age of machines, of timelessness though timeliness.

The AIA Gold Medal honors an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. The award will be presented at the American Architectural Foundation's Accent on Architecture Gala on February 22, 2008, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.   >>>

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SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Elegant use of common materials, such as terra cotta, unifies the eight Piano-designed buildings at Potsdamer Platz. Photo: © Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) The 1987 Menil Collection Museum in Houston, Texas, one of Piano's early solo museum projects, demonstrates his ability to use building structure to communicate purpose and meaning. Photo: © RPBW Extra Large Image SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Piano's museum designs display an extraordinary sensitivity and balance in the application of daylighting. Photo: Hickey & Robertson / © RPBW South facade of the Beyeler Foundation Museum (1997), designed by Renzo Piano with engineering firm Arup. Photo: Christian Richters Piano's design for the Beyeler Museum, as for many of his other museum projects, connects exhibit spaces with the surrounding landscape. Photo: Michel Denancé / © RPBW Extra Large Image The roof of the Beyeler Foundation Museum diffuses daylight through a combination of glass layers separated by a system of internal louvers. Photo: Michel Denancé / © RPBW Extra Large Image SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Each pavilion of the Nasher Sculpture Center is enclosed by low-iron glass facades that permit unobstructed views from the street through the building and across the length of the garden. Photo: Timothy Hursley SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, includes a five-pavilion exhibition building and a large exterior sculpture garden. Photo: Timothy Hursley SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE The expanded High Museum of Art in Atlanta: the original Richard Meier (right) and the new wings by Renzo Piano (center and left), surrounding the central plaza. Photo: Timothy Hursley The light scoops atop the High Museum of Art expansion (2005) create remarkably uniform illumination for the artwork. Photo: Jonathan Hillyer   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.