Italian-born architect Renzo Piano, who achieved international renown for the immensely popular Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and has gone on to design a wide range of buildings that fuse advanced technology with traditional craftsmanship, on Monday will be named the 1998 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s most prestigious honor.
The $100,000 prize is given annually by the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the award, President Clinton and his wife Hillary will host a June 17 White House ceremony at which the award will be bestowed upon Piano, 60.
Piano followed the 1977 completion of the brash Pompidou, a parody of high-tech imagery co-designed by British architect Richard Rogers, with projects of greater refinement and sensitivity to their surroundings.
They include the Museum for the Menil Collection in Houston (1987), the mile-long Kansai International Airport in Osaka (1994) and the conversion of a Fiat factory in Turin, Italy, into a hotel, trade fair and convention center that is substantially completed, but still in progress.
He also has built a soccer stadium, low-income urban housing and a Paris shopping center that resembles a silver spaceship.
“Renzo Piano’s command of technology is that of a true virtuoso, yet he never allows it to command him,” said the jury chairman, J. Carter Brown. “Deeply imbued with a sense of materials and a craftsman’s intuitive feel for what they can do, his architecture embodies a rare humanism.”
Piano, who lives in Paris and his native Genoa, Italy, comes from a family of builders, which helps account for why he cares not only about how things look, but also about how they are made.
When as a young man he approached his father about attending architecture school, the father is said to have replied: “Why do you want to be just an architect? You can be a builder.”
Piano has no signature style, although he typically develops a signature structural “piece” for each design. At the 11-year-old Menil museum in Houston, for example, he devised a leaf-like system of ceiling louvers that diffuse natural light throughout the galleries without harming the artworks. Their overall effect, comparable to a forest canopy, fulfilled the wishes of the client, the late Dominique de Menil, who wanted a gallery in which visitors would be aware of shifting seasons and the weather.
Piano also has displayed a knack for respecting the character of older cities while creating new icons that infuse them with vitality. Once symbolized by a rooftop test track, for example, the former Fiat factory being converted by Piano is now topped by a spectacular, steel-and-glass meeting room called “the Bubble.”
The architect was selected by a seven-member jury that included Fiat chairman Giovanni Agnelli. Bill Lacy, executive director of the Pritzker Prize, said he did not know if Agnelli removed himself from the jury’s deliberations to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. The discussions are confidential, Lacy said.
“We’re confident and assured that there was no pressure brought to bear on any member of the jury,” Lacy added.
Previous winners of the Pritzker Prize, first given in 1979, include I.M. Pei of New York City and Frank Gehry of Santa Monica, Calif. Piano is the second Italian to win the Pritzker. The first, the late Aldo Rossi, received the award in 1990.
