The architect is always looking for Atlantis. The architecture is a dream. Capsule hotels 
Interview with Italian architect Renzo Piano
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His studio is a glass box balanced between sea and mountains. Rests on a hillside just above the bay of Punta Nave, about 30 miles west of Genoa. Accessed by a transparent lift which climbs up the door open. The five levels of the fortress of light are a swarm of people gathered around several tables, examining drawings, models gazing or chatting in the corridors with a pen between his lips. Renzo Piano stops, nods, thoughtful touches his beard, smiles. Their study, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, is one of the most active and industrious in the world. We currently have 27 works in progress: from the Columbia University campus to the Tower Bridge of London, of a monastery of nuns in Ronchamp, France, Gandia, Valencia, where you just start the port city rating. ICO in Madrid Foundation will honor him with a retrospective in late September. At 72 years, born in Genoa in 1937 - seems endless. Jumps from one corner to another planet, divided between the Italian branch of RPBW, the New York and the oldest, opened in 1981 in Paris, where he lives. After controlling the work on site, he notes, come from the scaffolding, talk to workers and neighbors.
QUESTION. You prepare his speeches as a good reporter a piece. On the street.
RESPONSE. Can not be an architect without a perpetual research of reality. Without persistent and humble attitude of asking people and things that live in one place. A building is not an ornament, is something that speaks to its context. We must pay attention to that environment. Nor is it a celebration narcissistic interpret a community, do not be dating yourself. It's a hack, which includes incentives for anything. A constant theft, and very peculiar: a face uncovered and disarmed hand, perpetrated with the honest intention to return the merchandise in the future.
P. How do you get?
R. Mine was a very humble family, my father, a builder, my mother, housewife. But they managed to instill the seed of curiosity. I was forced to read. A diligent reading instinctively makes you curious. And only if you are interested in the world can hear.
P. The trick then is in your childhood?
R. I was not very good school. This has allowed me to grow with the idea that I had to learn from others. Nerds form thinking they are superior, and just being arrogant. I had the opposite feeling.
P. Does the World War affected his childhood?
R. Those who were born in war and grew up in the consequences we are children of a storm. We come into the world through drama, tragedy, fear. When peace came, we started to notice little changes: the streets were less ramshackle, buildings less leaky, more substantial food, the larger family car ... Day after day, life improved. In the end, it hits a sort of inherent optimism. Later came the university, the Polytechnic of Milan. Sharing a flat and ideas lived, worked in the cellar of the architect Franco Albini and evening participated in the occupation of the faculty. Those endless debates! We felt we could change the world.
P. Still thinking?
R. Sure! An architect has to cultivate the absurd idea that reality can be improved. The dream is what drives you.
P. However, building something with their feet firmly planted on the ground ...
R. The architect is two drives. If on one hand idealizes the other is on the ground. Study the light, wind, geology, technology. My work is based on the sheer force of necessity. It is based on truth, which is the closest thing there is stubborn and headstrong. We're all stuck there. But then I am open to any suggestion, because if you get crushed. It's a fun job that makes you an active witness in the world.
P. Enzo Biagi [important Italian journalist] said: "The reporter must be a witness of his time."
R. Heh, heh, I think, however, that an architect is a rare reporter. Is someone who becomes a citizen of the site that relates to his work. It takes years to finish a project and spend time in that place quite extensive, it does not take place on the surface, but deep. To build a city, I linked to it, you identify with it, considering you just own citizens. You are the prototype of antiturista, a person who lives his tenure with lightness.
P. Accomplished be a tourist at times?
R. Yes Behind the wheel of my boat. At sea, the essence of which participate in water sports. Touch the earth and you get to go. You Incidentally, printing Catches mutable browser. As an architect I can not. I force myself to understand the rhythms, rituals, feelings of a neighborhood, community. I'm still what I do. I go into a role. As an actor. Vittorio Gassman liked to repeat that an actor is a liar, however, can say things with great sincerity. The architect is not a liar, but should be able to reproduce what they capture in a city with great loyalty.
The Genoese architect actor has played some of the more symbols of contemporary history. Still young, in 1971, with his partner Richard Rogers, was gliding through the heart of Paris a new type of museum that Beaubourg all glass, open to the city, which broke with the Academy over a hundred Mays 68. He projected the Potsdamer Platz finally unified, just above the wound that had divided the world into two parts. The new headquarters of The New York Times was the first skyscraper built in the Big Apple after 11-S. Last year opened the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, a great flying carpet that catalyzes the cultural fervor of a proud city that is discovered after the election of one of its nationals to the White House. The environmentally sustainable California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, with its undulating roof and green, like a hymn to nature, when it is revealed frail man wonders how to stop vulnerable. In the work of interpreting the world, Piano seems to be always in the right place at the right time. When you do notice, breaks into a funny laugh. "I was lucky. The trick is not to take the antennas. You just be a sensor that captures the emotional waves and the needs of a community."
P. What was it that captured in New York? Building at the time was a kind of collective psychotherapy.
R. People needed to trust again. So we opted for an all-glass building with an auditorium for organizing events for citizens and a ground floor which is a continuous flow of people. Transparency will not hides and lets you see the world, provides security and sense of belonging. P.
What about Berlin?
R. Guilt. Need innocence. Desire to forget, inability to take a painful memory. Berliners are as follows: a clean slate. They had crossed it. In 1990, Potsdamer Platz was a desert. That was hard.
P. Had said it would be easier to build into nothingness in an urban context and very dense.
R. It is a common belief that without guidelines, in complete freedom, the creative can express themselves better. To not only create beautiful objects, you need a score, something to hold on. Fantasy is a wonderful thing. As the jam: rich, but not abuse and is even better up a good slice of bread.
P. Sleep and realism, jam and bread. So was born a project?
R. The slow part of the process. You meet with those who commissioned the work, who will use it with your colleagues. You must let the stimuli and the technical talk, flow, rest.
P. Does teamwork help?
R. Sure. Me is people over 30 or 40 years. Our meetings seem to ping-pong matches. Neither we remember who says what, ours is a collective process. Generate so much load then just a hand movement, a wrinkle in a sheet, to be born a sketch.
P. How is your relationship to the finished works?
R. Are your creatures, such as children. Although there have been independent, you keep worrying about them, you wonder how they are. And they're your memory. You get consistency. When you're with a new project always remember a solution adopted in the past, a mistake now to avoid ...
P. Do you re-visit?
R. Sure. For example, once a month I eat in the Beaubourg. The next day the director sent him a note like: "The window on the third floor in need of reform, the pot in the room that is cracked ...". 'll Go through an anxious mother, but this is my job.
P. Speaks of architecture as a profession and not as art.
R. I is reluctant to use that word: art. It is a concept that fades just saying it. As if claimed to be modest. Such self-proclaimed, and cease to be. I can not define an artist. The architect is a builder, a craftsman.
P. But what creates hard, like art.
R. The architecture is hard because the job to the cities. And the cities are long lived, like a good symphony. My friend Luciano Berio said that live music and architecture long time as rivers, mountains or forests.
P. And change reality ...
R. The architect is always looking for Atlantis. The architecture is a dream.
