Architect Piano pushes on with London's Shard of Glass

Mon Jul 11, 2005 2:20 AM BST
By Caroline Brothers

BERN, Switzerland (Reuters) - Italian architect Renzo Piano, designer of some of the world's most iconic landmarks, is forging ahead with a London skyscraper known as the "Shard of Glass" despite criticism and red-tape.

In a recent interview before the opening of another work -- a museum for modernist artist Paul Klee in the shape of three waves in the Swiss city of Bern -- Piano also said architects should not shy from taking risks.

"We have beaten Prince Charles, English Heritage and the nostalgics," Piano, regarded as one of the world's finest architects for his visionary and poetic designs, said of critics of his design for a colossal glass wedge over London's skyline.

"It's taking time, but we are doing it," he said of the much-delayed building that will contain a hotel, restaurants, and a viewing platform 240 metres in the air. The 72-storey building at Tower Bridge, commissioned by developer Irvine Sellar in 2000, is due for completion by 2010.

The Genoa-born Piano, 67, shot to fame in 1977 with Paris's "inside-out" Pompidou Centre co-designed with iconoclastic British architect Richard Rogers. The distinctive building has its pipes on the outside -- air conditioning ducts are blue, its water pipes are green and the electricity lines are yellow.

Piano, however, would not be drawn on his differences with Prince Charles, whose conservationist views have thrust him into headline-grabbing conflict with avant-garde architects such as himself, Rogers and Briton Norman Foster.

THE QUEEN AGREES

"In the analysis he is not bad, but he is very bad in his response -- and I can tell you that his mother agrees with me," Piano said. "You can't be nasty about modern medicine and as a consequence propose returning to the remedies of the 17th century. It's just not possible."

If his futuristic designs have sometimes brought controversy, Piano has never shied from taking artistic risks.

As well as the ground-breaking Pompidou Centre, and an extraordinary cultural centre for the Kanak people in New Caledonia, Piano designed the Kansai International Airport for the Japanese city of Osaka on an artificial island in the sea.

It has been dubbed one of the most extraordinary engineering feats of the 20th century.

"We take risks all the time -- you have to take risks, otherwise you become paralysed," said Piano. "And that is very bad, because then you lose your freedom."

The man who has also designed an experimental car for Fiat and a travelling pavillion for the world's largest computer company, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), says architects must keep reinventing themselves.

"It is true that there is a certain tendancy in architecture to sign things that are always the same," he said.

"That is very bad news. (The design) loses its power and flattens out and the self-referential aspect becomes almost more important, whereas in our field, as in cinema, the essential thing is the freedom with which you interpret a situation."

His Zentrum Paul Klee, which has just opened, is anything but self-referential. The asymmetrical glass and steel waves that emerge from the hillside "like a dinosaur without its spines" constitute something of a unique architectural feat.

The vault of its highest arch is 14 metres high, flattening to a technically challenging 4.5 metres under the hillside. The entire building follows a barely perceptible curve that matches the sweep of the motorway nearby.

"I am quite impatient for the grass to grow, like in a ruin by Piranesi," said Piano, referring to the 18th century artist who depicted the splendours of ancient Rome overgrown by plants.

He was concerned that the still-green wheat and the poppy flowers that surround his Paul Klee complex were not yet tall enough to convey the same merger with nature.

THE DESIGN WAS ALREADY THERE

Though inspired by Klee as a teacher of the interwar Bauhaus school of architecture and design, Piano found the idea for the centre's three waves in the lie of the land itself.

"I remember it perfectly just like it was yesterday, this terrain with the movement of the hills and the tracks from working the land -- all that was already here," he said.

"I've never done a job without walking around the place with my hands in my pockets trying to understand ... even when we did the competition for the Kanaks in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean," he said.

"You have to make sure you listen, and discern the little interior voice, the 'genius loci' -- the genie of the place."

Piano said his understanding of Klee, whose colourful, poetic and abstract works make him one of the pillars of modernism, changed as the building took shape.

"I knew Klee chiefly as a teacher of the Bauhaus ... But (as the project developed) I started to understand a bit better his true career which was in painting. That is where he is deepest, in painting, in his daily work."