"The
array of buildings by Renzo Piano is staggering in scope and
comprehensive in the diversity of scale, material, and form. He is truly
an architect whose sensibilities represent the widest range of this
and earlier centuries." Such was the description of Renzo Piano given
by the Pritzker Prize jury citation as they bestowed the prestigious
award on him in 1998. Whereas some architects have a signature style,
what sets Piano apart is that he seeks simply to apply a coherent set
of ideas to new projects in extraordinarily different ways. "One of the
great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life
starting all over again," Piano says. "Like a movie director doing a
love story, a Western, or a murder mystery, a new world confronts an
architect with each project." This explains why it takes more than a
superficial glance to recognize Piano's fingerprints on such varied
projects as the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kansai airport in Osaka,
Japan, the Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, The New
York Times Building in New York, the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern,
Switzerland, and the Morgan Library in New York.
