Renzo Piano: “Come conservare la memoria dei luoghi che cambiano?”

Abstract

Mainly known for its fine new museums and skyscrapers all over the world, Renzo Piano has been involved several times in restoring, reconverting and transforming existing buildings and disused factories, focusing on town planning and making public spaces. This paper analyses the seminal experiences of the Unesco “Laboratorio di quartiere” in Otranto (1979) and the renovation of the Schlumberger industrial workshops in Paris (1981-84). In the first one Piano - after the seven years Centre Pompidou building site - plunged in a little historical urban centre in southern Italy, proposing soft and punctual intervention techniques. In the second one the Genoese architect faced for the first time the reconvention of an industrial plant, experimenting design approaches later used in the huge renovation of the Lingotto in Turin (1987-2002). Moreover, recently, Piano inserted new buildings in very delicate contexts: the metallic volume of the Fondation Pathé in a historical city block in Paris (2006-2014) and the mending of the architectural and natural landscape of Ronchamp (2006-2011), with the addition of a new gatehouse, monastery and guesthouse near the Le Corbusier masterpiece. Discussing these projects some common strategies emerge: preserving the external walls as shared urban symbols; designing not a finished building but a kit of prefabricates parts; using the vegetation and the water as hinges between the renewed building and the urban context.