Zitat des Tages von Renzo Piano:
I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.
Every year I spend one month just sailing, but I still work when I'm on the boat. You never separate work from leisure. A boat is like a magic world, like a little island.
A builder is like a little god - somebody who does things, doesn't just draw things.
London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.
A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand.
When I was a student in the '60s, I dreamt of making a house 7 feet by 7 feet, as a dream of freedom, of self-moderation.
In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don't have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.
A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.
The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams.
In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.
When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.
Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.
There is something about giving everything to your profession. In Italian, an obsession is not necessarily negative. It's the art of putting all your energy into one thing; it's the art of transforming even what you eat for lunch into architecture.
Great American art needs the idea of uninterrupted spaces, like a loft, which itself is something very American.
