Renzo Piano

"One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting again." -Renzo Piano The Renzo Piano Box is a set of highly collectible volumes by star architect Renzo Piano. The box is an elegantly designed slipcase that envelops three (11" x 11") gorgeously printed paperbound books, each showcasing one of the great architect's iconic buildings: The Whitney Museum, in New York; The Shard in London; and the Stravos Niarchos Foundation in Athens. Callaway plans to publish a box every season, each with three different titles, and to bring to the many readers and fans of Piano's astonishing architectural masterpieces his entire series of collected works. The Whitney Museum, New York: In 2015, the new home of the Whitney Museum opened to the public in downtown Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, substantially enlarging the Whitney’s exhibition and programming space. The new building includes some 4,650 sq. meters of gallery space distributed over the fifth, sixth and seventh levels. The fifth level boasting a 1670 sq. meters, column-free gallery - making it the largest open-plan museum gallery in New York City. The book includes many architectural drawings and the text at the end of the book provides the reader with a “behind the scenes” view. A conception of the museum that starts from the work of art to arrive at the architectural project. A journey that takes the reader through time and space during its realization. The Shard, London: The London Bridge Tower, the tallest building in Europe, also known as the Shard, is a 72-storey, mixed-use tower located beside London Bridge Station on the south bank of the river Thames. A mix of uses – residential, offices and retail – creates a building that is in use 24 hours a day. The slender, pyramidal form of the tower was determined by its suitability to the mix of large floor plates at the bottom for offices; restaurants, public spaces and a hotel located in the middle; private apartments at the top of the building. The final floors accommodate a public viewing gallery, 240 m above street level. This arrangement of functions also allows the tower to taper off and disappear into the sky, and makes the building look like a shard of glass, a particularly important detail for architect Renzo Piano given the building’s prominence on the London skyline. The Stravos Niarchos Cultural Centre, Athens: The Stavros Niarchos Cultural Centre was constructed in Kallithea, 4 km south of central Athens. An important cultural and educational project, the site comprises the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Opera in a 170,000 square meter landscaped park. Previously a parking lot left over from the 2004 Olympic Games, once upon a time the site of a racetrack, this new Renzo Piano project restores the site’s lost connections with the city and the sea.

Renzo Piano has created some of the most emblematic buildings of our age, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Shard in London, the Parco della Musica in Rome, and the New York Times Building in New York City. Here, Renzo Piano himself – whose many international awards include the prestigious Pritzker Prize – presents in his own words the works on which he has built his reputation over a span of fifty years. Over one hundred works are described (almost twice as many as featured in the original edition that this volume supersedes), accompanied by over one thousand images, including new photographs, drawings and sketches, both intimate and authoritative, all with commentaries by the architect that combine personal anecdote and technical description with original insights. This is an unmatched introduction to the work of one of the world’s most influential and inspiring architects.

The extraordinary sculptures of Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon The first half of Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon’s (1934–2005) career was devoted to posters, illustrations, and television animations that brought him international acclaim for their diversity and virtuosity; his illustrations appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Fortune, and Esquire. In the 1990s, he pivoted to sculpture, focusing on statuary and working with both direct carving and modeling, which he then translated to bronze or stone. This is the first publication to explore the entirety of Folon’s sculptural work. Drawing inspiration from the Cyclades, the Etruscans, from African masks and Indian totems, Folon’s sculptures are characterized by their frontality and corporality. Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:Villers-la-Ville, Brussels (October 24, 2020–February 21, 2021)

The Live Centre of Information: From Pompidou to Beaubourg (1969- 1971) unpacks the history behind one of the most iconic buildings of contemporary architecture. On July 19, 1971, Jean Prouv presented the winning design of the future Centre Pompidou in Paris to an astonished audience. The project's architects, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini, were considered "unknowns"; its sponsors, the engineers at Ove Arup & Partners, were simply forgotten; the project's idea of a "Live Centre of Information" was denigrated as a "metallic dam" in the heart of Paris; the jury was presumed to have been dominated by the charismatic Philip Johnson and the man who initiated the competition, President of the Republic Georges Pompidou, to have been forced to bend to the jury's will.Fifty years after those events, it is time to analyze these false certainties through the first chronological and documentary reconstruction of the genesis of the Centre Pompidou.

This is the story of the replacement for the Morandi Bridge in Genoa which collapsed depositing a number of drivers to their deaths a couple years ago. “Building this bridge was like building a cathedral. I imagined it, but it took it shape only when it became a choral work, thanks to the efforts of over a thousand people. It was the most beautifulconstruction site I have ever had in all my life. Simply extraordinary”. With these words Renzo Piano, on the morning of August 3rd 2020, inaugurated the Genoa San Giorgio Bridge. A complex project, born from a tragedy, in a place where “we are all lost ourselves,two years ago, and here we find ourselves again today “. A professional adventure, but above all human, unforgettable. This volume, edited and published by the Renzo Piano Foundation within the monographic series dedicated to Renzo Piano’s iconic projects, tells the entire path in images, from the demolition of the Morandi Bridge to today. The history of the project is chronologically reconstructed through more than 100 drawings, unpublished sketches, models and prototypes, annotations, and construction site photos. In this way the entire process is well documented, including the different design phases, the proposals then modified or abandoned in the final project and second thoughts. Renzo Piano’s story especially collected in July 2020, a few weeks after the opening of the bridge, was recorded and faithfully transcribed in the volume. This book thus becomes a travel notebook that accompanies the reader in every phase of that extraordinary adventure that is the profession of designing and making buildings. Because “building is the opposite of destroying, it is creating."

"For those who love boats, architecture and original enquiring minds, this book is a dream. " -Jeremy Irons World-famous architect Renzo Piano and his son Carlo set sail from Genoa one late Summer day, guided by the ancestral desire felt by many explorers before them: to find Atlantis (in Italian, Atlantide). Atlantis is the perfect city, built to harbour a perfect society. This is its true beauty, precious and elusive. Renzo Piano, a man who can not only measure land at a glance but also the sea’s infinite geometry, returns to the places where he has erected his works, mosaic pieces in the infinite, necessary quest for perfection. With his son he sails across the Pacific, along the banks of the Thames and the Seine, reaching as far as Athens, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and Osaka Bay. In search of beauty, he finds the imperfections that every building project carries within it. And so, all that remains is to sail on.

Renowned architect Renzo Piano (the New Whitney Museum, the Pompidou Center, Potsdamer Platz, Cite Internationale, New York Times Building, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, etc.) and his son Carlo, a well-regarded journalist, set sail from Genoa one late Summer day to search for Atlantis, the perfect city, built to harbor a perfect society. Embarking not only on a life-changing journey but also on series of conversations that are humorous, irreverent, erudite, and always entertaining, Renzo and Carlo travel from Genoa in search of the perfect city, along the way reflecting on their own relationship, on fathers and sons, on the idea of travel itself, and perhaps most notably on architecture, space, and the secret life of forms. Piano, subject of The Art of Making Buildings and a man who can not only measure land at a glance but also the sea's infinite geometry, returns to the places where he has created his iconic works, mosaic pieces in the infinite, necessary quest for perfection. With his son he sails across the Pacific, along the banks of the Thames and the Seine, reaching as far as Athens, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and Osaka Bay. In search of beauty, Piano finds only imperfection. And so, all that remains is to sail on, in the company of his son.

This book is a real journey through the conception of the Centre Pompidou, with the presentation of the unpublished archives from the Renzo Piano Building Workshop.