“Travel is discovery, travel is life. When you set out on your travels, you look for one thing and find another. A journey is a bit like going to some big library and looking for a book. It’s true that you’re looking for one book, but while you’re searching for it, you’ll come across a lot of others.” Renzo Piano wrote this when the foundation that bears his name created the Renzo Piano World Tour Award. Architects grow when traveling, and this annual prize organized by Milly Piano, the Italian architect’s wife, has since 2017 given fresh graduates the opportunity to grow as they visit masterworks of Renzo Piano Building Workshop around the world in forty days: a Vernian voyage that reveals other admirable buildings, like the other books of that library Piano mentions.
A decade before creating the award, the Genoan and universal architect had set up his foundation with the double aim of preserving his archives and promoting his idea of apprenticeship in a workshop, with young people learning from veterans. On the one hand, the foundation took the reins, with Milly in charge, of the professional training program instituted by RPBW in the early 1990s, through which top graduating students of architecture from a dozen universities had the chance to close the gap between knowledge acquired at school and the realities of professional practice. On the other hand, as part of the task of reorganizing and documenting the work of RPBW, the publication of monographs on the firm’s most loved buildings was initiated.
Each of the sixteen books so far printed chronologically recounts the long process of giving shape to and carrying out a project, from the first trip to the site up to opening day. They are travel journals profusely illustrated with press clippings, photographs, plans, and drawings, most of them uncirculated, and briefly accompanied by explanations of the architect and his collaborators, recorded and faithfully transcribed, plus testimonies of grateful clients who always express admiration for the brilliance and cheerfulness of Piano and his team.
This magazine has been covering the series piloted by Lia Piano, the architect’s daughter. Now we look at the four that remained to be reviewed: two on works built in the United States, the Whitney Museum in New York City and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles; and two in Europe, the CERN Science Gateway in Geneva and the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris. These exceptional buildings attest to RPBW’s ubiquity and experience in cultural programs. Structured like nautical logbooks, the books record the history of artifacts seemingly constructed with nuts and screws, some of them angular and others more bulbous but always equally able to breathe new life into the institutions they harbor within them, or into the areas where they are anchored, be these beautiful, insipid, or loaded with history. Excellently documented volumes that show RPBW’s talent for making construction an art of structural detail.
