Piano was born in Genoa into a family of builders, studied at Milan Polytechnic, and worked briefly for Louis Kahn in Philadelphia before returning to Italy. His international reputation began at thirty-four, when he and Richard Rogers won the 1971 competition for the Centre Pompidou, turning a Paris museum inside out so its structure, escalators and ducts run up the exterior and the interior stays open, unencumbered floor. Piano founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in 1981, and its subsequent work runs from the Kansai International Airport terminal, engineered with Peter Rice to withstand typhoons and the settling of reclaimed land, to museums for the Menil Collection, the Beyeler Foundation and the Whitney. Piano resists being read as a stylist: each building is argued from its site, climate and structural logic rather than a signature form. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1998.
