Renzo Piano, architect and builder: “We can very well look into the past without any nostalgia”

Renzo Piano is a world-renowned architect, one of the greatest. He received the Pritzker Price from the hands of Bill Clinton in 1998. He is the one who created the Beaubourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Withney Museum of American Art in New York, the Chicago museum, and a total of 33 museums in the world to date . Renzo Piano also designed the new courthouse in Paris, the New York Times building, the musical auditorium in Rome, the Hermès house in Tokyo, not to mention the bridge in Genoa, his hometown, which collapsed in 2018, a bridge that he rebuilt for free. The Italian architect and Parisian by adoption is today in charge of the project for the future large university hospital of Saint-Ouen, north of Paris.

He is thus the architect of dozens of buildings and monuments: “They are creatures, children, as if we had a hundred children all over the world, we turn around, we love them, we care that they are happy, that they are doing well. Sometimes they are happy, sometimes they are unhappy. You know, for a building to do well, the people who live in it must be happy.“

The architect admits to regularly traveling to see, to look, without being nostalgic. He remembers Pierre Boulez for whom nostalgia is a kind of illness, and in his eyes “we can very well look into the past without any nostalgia, since what keeps you alive in life is not what you have already done, it is what you still have to do“.

From the pile of sand to shelter for man, build

At 88 years old, this work is still a dance for Renzo Piano, he loves the construction site and even says he wants to die on a construction site. His first memories are on a pile of sand, him growing up in a builders’ house, with his father, his uncles, etc. As he grew up, he learned that the job of a builder was to build shelters for people, “and that has never been just a technical operation, it has always had something magical, building also means doing something that belongs to you, that resembles you“.

Renzo Piano’s next major project is that of the new university hospital campus in Saint-Ouen, north of Paris. Here he joins his doctrine on the well-being of people, the hospital has the difficulty of having to combine the well-being of the doctor and that of the patient. In the 19th century, hospitals were suburban, but did not work, those of the 20th worked very well but forgot the light, forgot the man. “We must rediscover this beauty, without forgetting of course medical excellence.“

The challenge for Renzo Piano for this future hospital in Saint-Ouen is to bring back light and greenery: “For example, for the caregiver the roof is a garden, we go to lunch up there, we talk with people, a moment of conviviality, and we go to look at the city (…) From each room, the patient looking outside see a tree“. For the architect, “nature itself with its changes, its rituals, is a promise of healing, it is a metaphor for healing“.

Beaubourg, a project that had no chance of winning

An exhibition at the Pathé-Jérôme Seydoux Foundation is devoted to the constructions he carried out in Paris, from the very emblematic Beaubourg to the social housing on rue de Maux, the Paris court, the Pathé Palace cinema…

He says for Beaubourg that at the time he made an act of rebellion with his partner, at that time everything was possible, even the fact that 2 young architects aged 30 won among 600 applications. “Before that, a very special thing was happening in Paris, there was May-68 of course but there was the idea of ​​a Maison de la culture by Malraux”, a place combining cinema, music or photography, all possible artistic approach, together or alone, “it was a very interesting idea, but to apply it to a large building was not our idea, it was Pompidou’s idea, I believe Madame Pompidou“. A building which aroused crazy reactions, sometimes extreme, enthusiastic or horrified, with its metallic silhouette surrounded by enormous pipes and all colors in a city of stone buildings. “We knew we weren’t going to win, we did it for fun, we dreamed. (…) And in front of us, a jury, a client, who knew how to dream. And these are the planets aligning.“He who today knows the word “impossible” in several dozen languages ​​because he has heard it so much, was living a dream that day.

We exist by the sum of what we have approached

Renzo Piano: “We don’t exist, we are the sum of all the people we have loved, the books we have read, the films we have watched, the trips we take, the loves we have had. . We are that. The genius that was Louis Burgess wrote that life is somewhat suspended between memory and forgetting. We remember all that and we forget too.“He continues with this idea that no matter what job we do, we have it all in us, and everything we have in us comes out at every moment.”That’s beautiful, magnificent, it’s even a little immortality I think.“

The rest of this interview with Renzo Piano can be listened to here…