Renzo Piano Building Workshop - Vol.
2
Peter Buchanan
Phaidon (1995), $75 hardcover, 240 pp., 707 illustrations
Reviewed by Lester Paul Korzilius
Approximately 475 words
Published in Oculus, March 1996
This book is the second in a series covering the work
of Renzo Piano. The completed buildings started design in the mid 1980's,
and the ongoing projects began design in the last few years. A third volume,
covering the recently completed Kansai Airport, will be a forthcoming issue,
with this volume showing only construction photographs. The monograph is
well designed, with each project featured on its own. The stand-out projects
are the Bercy 2 Shopping Centre, National Center for Science and Technology,
the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church, and the JM Tjibaou Cultural Centre. Also
of interest is the masterplan for Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. Other buildings
in the book include the Thompson Optronics Factory, the Lingotto Factory
Renovation (with the famous rooftop car testing track), the Beyler Foundation
Museum, and others. These later buildings, while excellent projects, retrace
ground that Piano has already successfully explored in early projects.
The former projects, however, point to a direction in architecture, using
the computer in design and construction, to produce more humane and intricate
works of architecture.
The Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church, planned for Italy, seems to best express
the inherent possibilities of this new direction in architecture. The church
with 10,000 seats, has a spiraling plan off a piazza that holds 30,000
worshipers. The space will be built with overlapping sets of funicular
stone arches spanning up to 160 feet each, off which the wood roof is propped.
I believe when built, this project will greatly enhance Piano's reputation
as an architect of depth and feeling. Peter Rice, before his untimely death,
was the consulting engineer on this project.
The JM Tjibaou Cultural Centre planned for New Caledonia is a mini-village
with a central circulation spine served by circular curved exhibition areas.
It is a remarkably humane design. It will be built primarily of wood and
glass, with clever details for shading and natural ventilation. The high-tech
flourishes of the exhibition areas are reminiscent of the IBM traveling
pavilion designed more than a decade ago by Piano.
The Bercy 2 Shopping Centre in France is, in plan, a standard shopping
center whose design others had set. Piano covers it with a doubly curved
warped shell that acts as wall and roof. The form is appropriate given
the building's siting among a freeway interchange. The geometry of the
roof is complex, but the actual structure and roof panels are remarkably
simple. Without the computer, it is unlikely that Piano would have realized
this design. This project set the theoretical groundwork for the sweeping
torroidal roof of the Kansai Airport whose 90,000 cladding tiles are identical.
Some critics would accuse Piano's early works for being exquisitely
detailed works of construction, but lacking in humanness and depth of feeling.
Some projects in this book, particularly the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church,
will surely make a dent in these critics' opinion.
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