A tribute to Renzo Piano.
The Royal Academy of Arts of London does homage to one of the greatest architects of our times by organising Renzo Piano. The art of Making Buildings (15 September 2018 – 20 January 2019), an extraordinary exhibition designed and curated in close collaboration with Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Fondazione Renzo Piano.
The visitors can follow Piano’s career, from the influence of his Genoese heritage and his rise to acclaim alongside friend and collaborator Richard Rogers, to current projects still in the making.
Focusing on 16 key buildings, the exhibition explores how the Renzo Piano Building Workshop designs buildings “piece by piece”, making deft use of form, material and engineering to achieve a precise and yet poetic elegance.
It includes rarely seen drawings, models, photography, signature full-scale maquettes and a new film by Thomas Riedelsheimer that show how inspiring architecture is made; moreover, at the heart of the exhibition is an imagined “Island”, a specially designed sculptural installation which brings together nearly 100 of Piano’s projects.
From The Shard in London to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the buildings of Renzo Piano have enriched cities across the globe, united by a characteristic sense of lightness and an interplay between tradition and invention, function and context: the event’s aim is to reveal the vision behind his pioneering work, showing how architecture can touch the human spirit.
