Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano (born 1937) is an Italian architect, born in Genoa into a family of builders. He graduated from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1964. With Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini he won the 1971 competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which opened in 1977. He later founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, received the Pritzker Prize in 1998 and was named an Italian senator for life in 2013.

The Centre Pompidou has its steel structure, escalators and color-coded pipes for air, water and electricity on the outside, leaving the floors inside open. Piano's later museums control daylight from above: the Menil Collection in Houston (1987) has a roof of curved concrete louvers that filter sunlight into the galleries, and the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, near Basel (1997), has a glass roof over long stone walls.

Other works include the terminal of Kansai International Airport, on an artificial island in Osaka Bay (1994); the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa, New Caledonia (1998), with tall curved wooden shells based on Kanak huts; the New York Times Building (2007); the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (2008), which has a planted roof; the Shard in London (2012), on completion the tallest building in the United Kingdom; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2015).