John Tusa interviews Renzo Piano (cont.)

In John Tusa’s interview with him (RealAudio stream), Renzo Piano says lots of interesting things. For instance, about how together with Richard Rogers in the 1970s, he designed Centre Pompidou in Paris, to be about flexibility, to accept any change, because a cultural building should be able to change with the times. And apparently they made big changes to it recently, 25 years after its opening.

Then he talks about architects versus builders, and how his father, who was a builder, wanted him to become a builder as well, and not just an architect. This reminded me of something I read about bricolage.

Piano says that being an architect is about solving problems, you can’t be just a practical man. For this, he says, you must master the art of listening to, and understanding people. In the late seventies, Piano worked with communities and urban renewal, and he says that this made him more sensitive to the little sounds. Then, he worked more with designing the tools to enable people to create buildings, rather than creating the buildings themselves. And he says something very Jane Jacobs, that when dealing with cities, you must employ a “homeopathic process” instead of surgery, because cities are vulnerable and you can easily destroy their subtle dynamics.

In the interview, Piano compares architecture to movie making, because in a way you start from scratch with each new project, but in another way you don’t—because “you have your own coherence and your own system of doing things. But you have to stay away from the notion of a style,” because then you repeat yourself. Also, being an architect is like being a movie director, because you “need to work with talent,” to bring together different talents.

He also compares it to music, and says that architecture, like music, depends a lot on discipline and order, and “then you play in that order”—which I interpret as setting up frameworks to work within. “And sometimes,” he continues, “you become disobedient to that order, then you break the order, but you need the order.” This reminded me of how narratives must both establish rules and expectations, and break them.

In the case of the Kansai International Airport in Japan, its final form is the result of a number of forces, such as the building having to be “seismically correct,” understanding how passengers move and the flow of air, etc. It’s been said to look like a dinosaur, but Piano says it wasn’t an attempt to copy nature, but to do “the same job nature is doing.”

John Tusa asks Piano how he begins the work on a building, and Piano says that he always spend days, and sometimes even weeks, wandering around, trying to understand the place, listening to its talk. “You just have to shut up and listen,” he says. Also, it’s very difficult to get the scale right, because you can’t, as a sculptor can, work in the same scale as the end result. So you need to have a good imagination. He says that the greatest compliment is “when people say it’s like this building has been there since ever.”

Tusa asks whether Piano ever has flashes of insight, where early ideas become part of the final building. Piano mentions The New York Times Building, currently under design, where an early idea came from how Manhattan changes color during the day, which they wanted the building to capture.

Piano talks more about his process, and how it’s not about a master presenting his great ideas, but about teamwork. He says it’s a circular process, where they go back and forth between working on details and on the whole. They use models a lot (wooden models, which I saw on an exhibition at Louisiana in Denmark). But it’s also about alternating teamwork and “silent personal work.” And when you get stuck, he says you can change scale, work on something else, and then go back and the problems are often obvious.

Renzo Piano is a very interesting person. I have written about his building workshop, which is organized like a Bottega, a workshop where professionals and students work together as peers. Also, I’m happy to see that his website contains a lot more information about his projects than when I last checked.