Renzo Piano

The mechanics of lightness. The wide-ranging career of the Italian virtuoso. "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 Noumea, New Caledonia, The New York Times Building in New York, the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, and the Morgan Library in New York. Every book in TASCHEN's "Basic Architecture Series" features: approximately 120 images, including photographs, sketches, drawings, and floor plans; introductory essays exploring the architect's life and work, touching on family and background as well as collaborations with other architects; the most important works presented in chronological order, with descriptions of client and/or architect wishes as well as construction problems and resolutions; and, an appendix including a list of complete or selected works, biography, bibliography and a map indicating the locations of the architect's most famous buildings.