Renzo Piano’s Light Touch
The world-renowned architect Renzo Piano grew up in Italy watching his father, a local builder, work on construction sites, and he was fascinated by his father’s gravitation toward cumbersome materials—concrete, stone, and bricks. “As usual, you grow up wanting to do the opposite of your father,” he said. “My father made heavy buildings; I always tried to make mine light.” He took inspiration from his native Genoa, a city built on water: “The harbor is a magical place where everything flies.” Piano has spent his career trying to recreate this sense of magic in his designs. He recently joined us to discuss his fascination with weightlessness, and his obsession with capturing it in his work. Books have been one of his “companions” in this lifelong endeavor, he said, highlighting four that have been exceptionally influential. His comments have been edited and condensed.
On the Nature of Things
by Titus Lucretius Carus
Lucretius, in an epic poem from the first century, described the way that the material world is made up of many tiny particles, or “elemental bodies.” He alluded to atoms well before they were formally discovered, writing:
Lucretius was a philosopher and a poet, but he was not a scientist. Yet he found a way to discuss matter, to posit that it’s more than what we can see and touch. It’s an incredible book, and it required a specific kind of lightness—a lightness of the mind.
The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
To be a good builder, you must have three things. The first two are a bit easier: you need to be very pragmatic in order to make solid structures that stand, and you must be a humanist, because the places that you create are for people. The third, beauty, is more difficult. In my mother language, Italian, the word for “beautiful”—bello—is also a word for “good.” In “The Idiot,” Prince Myshkin, the title character, says that “beauty would save the world.” He doesn’t just mean that which you can see; he’s also referring to goodness. It’s an extremely important observation. The other figures in the book—which essentially follows Prince Myshkin as he navigates life within Russian society—assume that he is an idiot, similar to the way that people assume beauty is frivolous. Neither is true. Dostoevsky knew exactly what he was doing; you could say that he, like Prince Myshkin, was enlightened.
The Baron in the Trees
by Italo Calvino
I spent some time with Italo Calvino. He visited me at the building site for the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, and I took him up and around the structure. It reminded me of his book “The Baron in the Trees,” which he had recently published, because it’s a story about venturing high above the ground. It centers on a young boy from a noble family who, fed up with his life, climbs up a big oak tree outside his home, vowing to stay up there forever. He spends the rest of his days moving from tree to tree; he befriends fruit thieves and falls in love, all while never touching the ground. It’s a magical book, a metaphor for flying. When I design buildings, like the Shard, in London, I create them so that they, like the baron, can fly.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
There’s a heaviness to life—to all of the things that we have to do day after day. You have to pay bills; you have to deal with illnesses; you have to manage your relationships with family members. This book, which is more of a sequence than it is a story, captures the way that you are the sum of all your responsibilities and experiences.
It reminds me of the short poem “Ithaca,” by C. P. Cavafy, which is about Odysseus’s journey home. Cavafy bids Odysseus a long journey “full of adventure, full of discovery.” Ithaca is not what matters—Cavafy cautions that Odysseus might not even be happy after he arrives—it’s the road there. Both Kundera and Cavafy convey something profound: that life is nothing more than the voyage, a thought that can serve as a sort of antidote to the burdens of living.
