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A Light in the PiazzaIt's easy to forget that the elegant Italian architect Renzo Piano's first big commission was totally out-rageous.
Thirty-five years ago, he and British colleague Richard Rogers teamed up to build the Pompidou Center-both unknown, they beat out 681 architects for the job-and their brash factory for culture, with its pop-colored industrial tubes, ducts and pipes, landed in a sedate Paris neighborhood like an alien spaceship.
"We were young, quite impolite bad boys," Piano recalled with a smile not long ago.
Now the Pompidou is a landmark, of course, and Piano's architectural manners are polished to a high gloss.
With two exquisite small American museums to his credit-the Menil Collection in Houston (1986) and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2003)-this Pritzker Prize-winning designer is on a museum-building binge that will leave his mark on half a dozen U.S. cities.
Designing museums is only a fraction of Piano's practice.
Directing a staff of 100 or so from offices in Genoa and Paris, he has projects all over the world, including a London skyscraper that will be the highest in Europe.
But aside from the 52-story New York Times tower, which will open in 2007, most of his projects in America are cultural-and the first one, the $109 million expansion of the High Museum in Atlanta, opens next week.
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1/11/2005 | Viewed 12,627 time(s)
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