PIANO FOR LUNCH

In an airy room inside Renzo Piano’s studio in the Marais district of Paris, a table is laden with delicious Italian antipasti and a bottle of Nuits St Georges. I have arrived a few minutes early, but my guest, who has overturned convention and decided to play host, makes his jaunty entrance soon afterwards. “Trust me,” says the slogan on his grey T-shirt, “I’m an architect.” Piano laughs heartily. “I wore it specially for the occasion.”
We sit down to our meal. I had insisted that the rules of this feature meant I had to take Piano out to lunch at his favourite restaurant, but he says he rarely eats out, and this was far more typical of his working life: a high-class takeaway in a specially created space in the studio. We are surrounded by activity, but also insulated from it. The sunlight streams through the glass roof, yet it is not too hot. The space is perfect; so is the food. The delivery, he says, is from Lenotre, the prestigious Parisian caterers. “Jambon de Parme. They know where to find the best quality.”
Piano, Genoese by birth, determinedly internationalist by vocation, lives just a few minutes way, in the incomparably elegant Place des Vosges. A brisk walk in the opposite direction takes him straight into another architectural universe: to the Pompidou Centre, the thrilling cultural landmark he co-designed with Richard Rogers in the 1970s. Nowhere is the appeal of Paris more keenly felt than in these few vibrant, eclectic blocks of extraordinary architecture and social ferment.
The Pompidou Centre was an iconoclastic achievement (”an act of rebellion - we were young bad boys,” says Piano) but, at 68, his style has inevitably softened, and is much in demand. Current projects include a new office tower for The New York Times Company, London Bridge Tower (known as the “shard of glass”) on the south bank of the Thames, and numerous museum expansions. He has just completed a well received renovation of the Morgan Library in New York, and past triumphs include a football stadium in Bari, Italy, and the Kansai airport terminal near Osaka, Japan.
I ask him how he manages to balance such a diverse portfolio, and he says the number of jobs he undertakes is circumscribed by the size of his practice: about 100 people, “which is enough - I can know the names of everybody”. That level of intimacy is essential, he says. “I am not a manager, I am an architect. I spend my time sketching.”
His sketches, and the buildings to which they lead, are highly regarded, though not always unanimously. Piano has just visited London where he gave a lecture in Southwark Cathedral on, among other things, London Bridge Tower, which at 1,016ft will be the second tallest building in Europe. (Moscow’s Federation Tower, already under way, will reach 1,115ft.) “It was my first ever sermon. The dean there is a great guy. He said he was very happy about the tower, but doesn’t like the title ‘shard of glass’ - he prefers ‘spire’. He said that a shard was something people cut their hands on, and I agree.”
I say that a lot of people think that a mega-skyscraper is the last thing that London’s skyline needs.
He understands the opposition to urban towers. “Typically, they are aggressive, arrogant, black, they go up like that - paf! They have a bad reputation and they deserve it. They are full of that desire to tell everybody: ‘I am stronger than you.’ They are about money and power. But that is only part of the story. When I think of towers I also think of San Gimignano, of the history of the church. That desire to go up, to breathe fresh air, to disappear into the sky, that is also a very spiritual thing. It is not a bad idea to go up in dense cities. Why not? As long as you stay away from bad rhetoric and bad symbols.” London’s new spire will be ecologically sound, use public transportation, and light - “like this”, he holds up a glass of water, “not like this”, pointing to our dark bottle of wine.
Were the attacks of September 11 not a hubristic moment for that type of architecture? Does he find it easy to continue to design upwards?
“September 11 was a terrible moment. It was human madness. But as an architect you cannot even think of giving a technical answer to an event like that. You cannot ask: ‘What can we do in the event of a terrorist attack?’ The only technical answer is caverns. They are the only safe place. And then you have the end of the city, and of civilisation. Citta comes from civilta,” he explains, dipping into his native language. “The city is the place of civilisation.”
Piano was in New York during the attacks, and the very next day he had a meeting to discuss The New York Times Company tower. “Of course we talked about how we could make the building safer, and we decided it was important not to turn it into a citadel or a fortress, but to make it as transparent and open as we possibly could.”
With the Morgan Library, he did the opposite of scraping the sky, digging through 50ft of rock to create new spaces for book conservation. “It was a practical solution. Ask any child where the best place to hide books is, and it is deep in the ground. The decision was taken before September 11. It was not fear. It is also conceptually good: something that has to be saved for eternity, inside these vaults that are impossible to pierce.”
How does he balance those elements of architecture, the practical and the conceptual? Is he initially attracted by ideas or by structural challenges?
“It is a mess,” he replies with disarming frankness. “It is the usual mess that exists at the beginning of everything. It is always a mess, and so it should be. Architecture is a material activity because you have to provide solid, durable shelter for people. But it is among the most spiritual of the arts, because it changes the world, changes lives. It is about beautiful things. And without a kind of Utopian vision, you cannot even try to be an architect, because it becomes academic and formal. It is like you writing because you like the sound of the words, rather than for their content.”
I noticed on a quick tour of his studio some designs for a building near Le Corbusier’s Church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp. He says this is a brand new project that no one has written about yet, to design some nuns’ quarters. “I was approached about a year ago to design a reception building for the church, but we said no, which is what we normally do. They came back a few months later and said they wanted somewhere for 12 nuns to live, in the forest near the church.
“That sounded more interesting. We said yes but I didn’t know where to start. We travelled there with six or seven students, and designed the building on the site, with hammers and rope. Like the great Indian architects. We started in the morning and finished in the evening. I was very cold but happy.” He draws a picture of the church and forest on a napkin.
So the reception building had not appealed, but as soon as something more profound suggested itself, he said yes? “You got it.” He completes the napkin drawing with his green pen, signs it, dedicates it to me and hands it over with an air of satisfaction. “The first idea was too pragmatic. It was about making toilets. It wasn’t really about making the forest breathe.”
I say that when I first visited the Pompidou Centre in 1979, it felt radical, not just for its remarkable inside-out look, but also for the way it worked: to design a place of culture as somewhere just to meet and hang out seemed outrageously bohemian at the time, whereas now it is commonplace.
“It didn’t change people’s approach to culture, but it became a symbol of that change. It was a symptom rather than a cause. We were good sensors of the moment.” He is pleased that it provoked curiosity in people. “That’s where it all starts, when you are young, maybe not used to culture. Curiosity. Instead of smoking hashish, you have a great experience in looking at a painting by Rothko. I have nothing against hashish. But it is more constructive to like a painting, no?”
He says he is much in demand among American cities to redesign their cultural institutions. “They want something European, a more subtle, more humanistic approach. They want to rethink the relationship between public and private space, between the building and the street. We are masters of that [in Europe]. At least we are not too bad. Sometimes we forget.”
He shows me some of his projects in Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, and reaffirms his faith in the potential of the modern city. “The city is a place of exchange, where people’s experiences merge, where differences can disappear. This can only happen in a civilised place, it does not happen in the country.”
Over perfectly made espressos, I ask Piano where he stands in the debate about modernism. He says he understands the “Prince Charles analysis” but can never share his conclusions because modernity represented the “honest challenge of belonging in our own time”. He met that challenge head-on with the Pompidou Centre. “People say it was a triumph of technology - no. It was a parody, part of the game, to say - ‘Welcome, come in, this building is for you.’
“Of course I was in hiding for many years before it was accepted. Now everybody is proud of it.” The lesson is loud and clear: trust him, he’s an architect.

Renzo Piano’s studio, Paris

2 x Italian antipasti (takeaway from Lenotre, Paris)
2 x fruit salad
1 x bottle Nuits St Georges
2 x espresso

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006