“Lightness and transparency are very close friends. You start from something and then you take off, you take off, you take off... And at a certain point you have to stop taking off, otherwise, everything falls down. If you do this you find that there’s a kind of beauty there. It’s a beauty that is profound, it’s not cosmetic.”
In this video by Luis Fernández-Galiano, Italian architect Renzo Piano talks about his path to finding beauty in lightness and transparency. This clip is a part of a full documentary and interactive booklet series by Fundación arquia and produced by White Horse.
“Our profession is a very dangerous one. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong forever. You have no right to make mistakes.”
Renzo Piano grew up in Genoa, Italy watching his father build sand, concrete and brick buildings. Piano wanted to run away, to see what was beyond the Ligurian sea. He wanted to do something different from his father and became an architect dedicated to beauty and lightness.
“If you don’t believe in the capacity of architecture to change the world for the better, if you don’t believe in the capacity of beauty to make a better world, if you don’t believe in that utopia, you better change profession.”
Video via: Folch Studio.
