Background and career
Renzo Piano (Italian: [ˈrɛntso ˈpjaːno]; born 14 September 1937) is an Italian architect. His notable works include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (with Richard Rogers, 1977), The Shard in London (2012), Kansai International Airport in Osaka (1994), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (2015), Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in Istanbul (2022), Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens (2016) and The New York Times Building in New York City (2007). He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998. Piano has served as a senator for life in the Italian Senate since 2013.
Piano was born and raised in Genoa, Italy, into a family of builders. His grandfather had created a masonry enterprise, which had been expanded by his father, Carlo Piano, and his father's three brothers, into the firm Fratelli Piano. The firm prospered after World War II, constructing houses and factories and selling construction materials. When his father retired, the enterprise was led by Renzo's older brother, Ermanno, who studied engineering at the University of Genoa. Renzo studied architecture at the University of Florence and Polytechnic University of Milan. He graduated in 1964 with a dissertation about modular coordination (coordinazione modulare) supervised by Giuseppe Ciribini and began working with experimental lightweight structures and basic shelters. Piano taught at the Polytechnic University from 1965 until 1968, and expanded his horizons and technical skills by working in two large international firms, for the modernist architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and for the Polish engineer Zygmunt Stanisław Makowski in London. He completed his first building, the IPE factory in Genoa, in 1968, with a roof of steel and reinforced polyester, and created a continuous membrane for the covering of a pavilion at the Milan Triennale in the same year. In 1970, he received his first international commission, for the Pavilion of Italian Industry for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. He collaborated with his brother Ermanno and the family firm, which manufactured the structure. It was lightweight and original composed of steel and reinforced polyester, and it appeared to be simultaneously artistic and industrial. The 1970 Osaka structure was greatly admired by the British architect Richard Rogers, and in 1971 the two men decided to open their own firm, Piano and Rogers, where they worked together from 1971 to 1977. The first project of the firm was the administrative building of B&B Italia, an Italian furniture company, in Novedrate, Como, Italy. This design featured suspended container and an open bearing structure, with the conduits for heating and water on the exterior painted in bright colors (blue, red and yellow). These unusual features attracted considerable attention in the architectural world, and influenced the choice of the jurors who selected Piano and Rogers to design the Pompidou Center.
In 1971, the thirty-four-year-old Renzo Piano and thirty-eight-year-old Richard Rogers, in collaboration with the Italian architect Gianfranco Franchini, competed with major architectural firms in the United States and Europe. They were awarded the commission for the most prestigious project in Paris: the new French national museum of 20th century art, to be located in Beaubourg. The award surprised the architectural world, as the team was relatively unknown and had no experience with museums or other major structures. The New York Times declared that their design "turned the architecture world upside down". More literally, it turned architecture inside-out, since in the new museum, the apparent structural frame of the building and the heating and air conditioning ducts were on the exterior, painted in bright colors. The escalator, enclosed in a transparent tube, ran diagonally across the façade. The building transformed a run-down commercial area near the Marais in Paris. The media dubbed the style of the building as "high-tech", but this was later disputed by Piano: "Beaubourg," he said, "was a joyous urban machine, a creature which might have come out of a Jules Verne novel, a sort of bizarre boat in dry dock... It is a double provocation; a challenge to academism, but also a parody of the imagery of technology of our time. To consider it as a high-tech object is a mistake."
In 1977, Piano ended his collaboration with Rogers and began working with engineer Peter Rice, who had contributed to the design of the Pompidou Centre. They established their offices in Genoa. One of their first projects was a plan for the rehabilitation of the old port of Otranto, transforming it from an industrial site into a commercial and tourist destination (1977). Their first major building was the Menil Collection, an art museum commissioned by collector Dominique de Menil. Her primary requirements was to maximize the use of natural light in the interiors. Piano wrote, "Paradoxically, the Menil Collection, with its serenity, its calm, its discretion, is much more modern, scientifically speaking, than the Beaubourg." The Menil Collection building, with its simple gray and white cubic forms, is the stylistic opposite of the Pompidou Centre. Its technological innovations are not expressed on the façade, but are embedded in discreet high-tech systems of shutters, screens, and air conditioning which allowed maximum natural light while protecting the interiors from Texas’s intense heat and sunlight.
In the mid-1980s Piano and his firm took on a wide variety of projects, using the most advanced technology available, but, in contrast to the Pompidou Centre, as discreetly as possible. His portable pavilion for IBM (1983–1986) was an example; designed with Peter Rice, of a lightweight portable tunnel for expositions. It composed of a series of pyramids of polycarbonate supported by a wooden frame, and could be transported in a truck. It was designed to integrate the scenery outside into displays in the interior. He designed two major reconstruction projects in northern Italy; the reanimation of the old port of his native city, Genoa, and the conversion and modernization of the gigantic and historic Fiat factory in Turin, Italy. For the Fiat Lingotto factory, he preserved the enormous main structure, including its famous oval test track for automobiles on the roof, but added new structures, including a concert hall beneath the building, a heliport, and a glass domed conference center on the roof. He continued his modifications and additions over two decades; without destroying the historic core of the building. The most recent was a museum for the art collection of the Fiat head Giovanni Agnelli in an elegant glass and steel box perched on the roof, as if it were about to take off; it was nicknamed the "Flying bank vault". Piano also carried out a large program for revitalization of the old port of Genoa to transform it from a rundown industrial area into a cultural center and tourist attraction. He prolonged streets to give access to the port, transformed old port buildings into cultural and commercial buildings, added a library, an aquarium and an auditorium, a botanical garden in glass dome and a giant multi-armed crane, modeled after the old cranes of the port, which hoists visitors high in the air for a view of the port. In addition, he designed the new headquarters of his firm, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (1989–1991), on a series of stepped terraces hanging over the Mediterranean to the west of the city. The building is accessed by an eight-passenger funicular railway car which shuttles up and down the hillside.
Bercy 2, nicknamed "The Whale", is a shopping mall with 70 stores and 36,000 m2 of retail space, located in Paris Charenton, along the banks of the River Seine and the "Périphérique" ring road. Inaugurated on 24 April 1990, it was only the third completed building by Piano after the Centre Pompidou. The mall's distinctive design features amcyclopean wooden structure clad in 27,000 satin-finished stainless steel tiles, and pierced with oculus to let an overhead light pass, is completely innovative. Its curved form, which follows the turn of the adjacent highway ramp, evokes the shape of a large airship, hence earning the nicknames "The Zeppelin" or "The Whale".
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
