Quotes from the book published as part of the Renzo Piano exhibition at the Louisiana; these first ones are from an essay by Aymeric Lorenté:
[Renzo] Piano believes that good architecture is teamwork, but not the work of an architect-only team. On the contrary, it is an adventure on which he always embarks with various other kinds of professionals: architects collaborate on projects with engineers and other technical specialists such as landscape designers, anthropologists, musicians or art specialists. [The latter two when building concert halls and art museums, I guess.] These professionals work on the design process from sketch to building site as genuine actors, not as extras […].
[–––] As for the term “Workshop” [in the name of his company, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, RPBW], it refers directly to the Renaissance concept of the Florentine “Bottega”. There, the artist worked in close association with his pupils, his trainees, providing work and a thorough grounding through teaching and experience. They would later establish workshops of their own and reproduce the pattern. The “Bottega” was a busy, active place, dedicated to creation and training, a place of movement, of ideas and of experimentation […]. What counts is the final project, and having everybody working together; any notion of hierarchy is sidelined. [I don’t know if this last one is a statement of Renzo Piano’s or if it is part of the bottega concept as well.]
At the [RPBW], the emphasis is thus on everyone’s participation in a project, from the senior partner to the intern, who gets a first chance to practice and gain valuable experience. Architecture students have always been actively present at the [RPBW], and they come each year from a dozen universities for six months. Emulation [imitation?] among architects, engineers and specialists is strongly encouraged, as a positive example for starting a career.
This reminded me of Richard Gabriel’s talk of the importance of having a body of “literature” (code) for computer science students to study. The RPBW and the bottega seems like a combination of this and writer’s workshops, something that Gabriel also advocates (for instance for writing poetry; he is a poet as well).
[After graduation and a few years’ experience as an architect] Piano established his first Italian office and dedicated himself to experimentation. […] What was important was to try over and over again, to see and judge the result of anything he could imagine […] He chose to work on a series of temporary structures, projects that would not last forever, but would give him further experience […].
[Afterwards], he remained faithful to this way of doing things, of experimenting, and to his curiosity […]. One remarkable particularity […] is that he can think up [something] that might at first seem crazy, unrealizable […]. Then, […] through long experimentation and close-knit teamwork, he always manages to reach his goal. This is also why he assigns such importance to the making of models: overall models or just details on various scales […]. During the design process he tries various solutions and has them built in life size to assess their effects, their aesthetic aspects and their feasibility; both his offices are now crammed with models of all sizes […]
In Kjeld Kjeldsen’s introduction to the book, he writes that the models that Piano’s two studios are full of serve as “the history and memory of the workshop, an important part of its aesthetic tradition”. I think this is important: it offers continuity, points of reference, and helps to builds a shared culture.
Speaking about his two studios – one in Genoa, Italy, and one in Paris, France – Lorenté continues:
But why does Piano maintain a geographical duality for what he considers a single entity? [T]o create, to design, Piano needs to reach a balance between tension and peace, noise and silence, concentration and excitement. Paris embodies movement and urbanity, Genoa embodies reflection and nature.
At the end of his essay, Lorenté writes that RPBW has about a hundred employees and that it’s a “deliberate choice to keep it this size […] to ensure it would not outgrow the “Bottega” dimension.”
The book contains also an essay by Deyan Sudjic, in which he writes that early in Piano’s career (in the 1960s), there was some “skepticism […] about the mythic individual creations. Architectural rhetoric […] was concerned with teamwork, creative partnership and the search for logic, and resisted the signature, or the egotistical architectural gesture.” Everywhere I’ve seen RPBW’s buildings mentioned, they have been referred to as works of Renzo Piano; the myth of the single creator still dominates (Stanley Kubrick, Walt Disney). Sudjic continues:
Piano is enough of a man of his own time to find a means of approach and an architectural starting point that resolutely reject [sic!] formal composition – even if his Roman concert halls depend on symmetry and axial planning. He is reluctant to compose a façade. Piano’s metaphors tend to be of a literal kind. His triangular London tower is an evocation, he says, of the sails of the ships that once might have moored at the quayside here […].
Where ideas for buildings come from is interesting. This quote suggests that the place is a source of ideas, as well as something one has to adapt to. From Kjeldsen’s introduction:
His works are further bound together by the concept of genius loci, the spirit of place – a preoccupation with the distinctiveness and culture of the individual place. They are always typified by a special concern with the exact context in which the building is to function and to which it is to be added.
The generation of architecture – not its construction! – is definitely a rich source of analogies for software development.