Biography
Piano was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1937 into a family of builders. He was educated and subsequently taught at the Politecnico di Milano. He graduated from the University in 1964 and began working with experimental lightweight structures and basic shelters. From 1965 to 1970 he worked with Louis Kahn and Z.S. Makowsky. He worked together with Richard Rogers from 1971 to 1977; their most famous joint project, together with the Italian architect Gianfranco Franchini (it) is the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1971). He also had a long collaboration with the engineer Peter Rice, with whom he shared a practice (L'Atelier Piano and Rice) between 1977 and 1981.
In 1981, Piano founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which today employs 150 people and maintains offices in Paris, Genoa, and New York City.
In 1994, Renzo Piano won the international competition for the new Auditorium in Rome. The Auditorium Parco della Musica, a large multi-functional public music complex situated in the north of city, was inaugurated in 2002.
In 1999, Piano designed a watch entitled "Jelly Piano (GZ159)" for the Swatch Summer Collection. The watch design is clear and the exposed inner workings were influenced by his Centre Georges Pompidou design.
On 18 March 2008, he became an honorary citizen of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Piano's recent expansion of the Art Institute of Chicago includes a 264,000-square-foot (24,500 m2) wing with 60,000 square feet (5,600 m2) of gallery space called the Modern Wing, which opened on 16 May 2009. It includes a "flying carpet", a sunscreen that hovers above the roof and a 620-foot (190 m) steel bridge connecting Millennium Park to a sculpture terrace that leads into a restaurant on the wing’s third floor.
His current projects include the The Shard, Europe's tallest skyscraper which was opened on July 6, 2012, and the Centro de Arte Botín. The Botin Foundation, the largest private foundation in Spain, will invest over US $150 million for the construction and programming of a new Botín Center that will become an international reference in culture and education for the development of creativity through art.
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