Renzo Piano Quotes

#1. Family is everything, although I've been fortunate enough to have worked with some of the most amazing minds over the years, including Renzo Piano, John Young, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour.

Richard Rogers

#2. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums.

Martin Filler

#3. London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

Renzo Piano

#4. In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.

Renzo Piano

#5. I don't remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

Renzo Piano

#6. I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.

Renzo Piano

#7. A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand.

Renzo Piano

#8. As an architect, you cannot be so arrogant as to say you are 100% sure about what you do.

Renzo Piano

#9. Great American art needs the idea of uninterrupted spaces, like a loft, which itself is something very American.

Renzo Piano

#10. If you have total freedom, then you are in trouble. It's much better when you have some obligation, some discipline, some rules. When you have no rules, then you start to build your own rules.

Renzo Piano

#11. Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

Renzo Piano

#12. In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don't have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.

Renzo Piano

#13. You can put down a bad book; you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot miss the ugly tower block opposite your house.

Renzo Piano

#14. Light has not just intensity, but also a vibration, which is capable of roughening a smooth material, of giving a three-dimensional quality to a flat surface.

Renzo Piano

#15. There is something about giving everything to your profession. In Italian, an obsession is not necessarily negative. It's the art of putting all your energy into one thing; it's the art of transforming even what you eat for lunch into architecture.

Renzo Piano

#16. A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

Renzo Piano

#17. Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.

Renzo Piano

#18. As an architect, you have to provide a shelter to enjoy art. And you have to love art. It's like when you make a concert hall. You must love music. This is the reason why you make the space, to enjoy music - making a space for art is the same thing.

Renzo Piano

#19. Knowing how to do things not just with the head, but with the hands as well: this might seem a programmatic and ideological goal. It is not. It is a way of safeguarding creative freedom.

Renzo Piano

#20. When you walk 25-30 feet above ground, it is a miracle, because you are still in the city ... but you are flying above the city. You are in the middle of trees, and that is a moment of beauty.

Renzo Piano

#21. I think people should try to teach young children that these qualities - stubbornness and a capacity to listen - might look like they are opposites, but they are not.

Renzo Piano

#22. Every year I spend one month just sailing, but I still work when I'm on the boat. You never separate work from leisure. A boat is like a magic world, like a little island.

Renzo Piano

#23. You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony.

Renzo Piano

#24. When I was a student in the '60s, I dreamt of making a house 7 feet by 7 feet, as a dream of freedom, of self-moderation.

Renzo Piano

#25. Architects have to dream. We have to search for our Atlantises, to be explorers, adventurers, and yet to build responsibly and well.

Renzo Piano

#26. I don't like the idea that the first preparation when you start to design your building has to put your label. I think this is not fair. It's not fair to the building or to the people, to the client, because every building tells a different story.

Renzo Piano

#27. Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.

Renzo Piano

#28. One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

Renzo Piano

#29. When a man is not satisfied with a house where he
lives, he becomes an architect

Renzo Piano

#30. The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams.

Renzo Piano

#31. The day I went to see my father to say I wanted to become an architect, he was a bit surprised, because for him being a builder is much more than being just an architect. He was very angry, and I never thought I could do something else.

Renzo Piano

#32. As an architect you are a builder. You are of course more than a builder. You need to be a militant, you have to be a poet, you have to be a visionary, you have to be an artist. But certainly you have to be a builder. Everything starts from there.

Renzo Piano

#33. A builder is like a little god - somebody who does things, doesn't just draw things.

Renzo Piano

#34. In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.

Renzo Piano

#35. My inspiration came from the land, ... and, of course, from Paul Klee ... and the poetics of his paintings.

Renzo Piano

#36. Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you're doing. You have to be sure about what you're doing.

Renzo Piano

#37. When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

Renzo Piano

#38. Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.

Renzo Piano

#39. I don't want to be romantic, but one of the most important things is to have happy buildings ... it's like having a family with a lot of children.

Renzo Piano