Piano and Rogers Overview

The short-lived partnership between the British Richard Rogers and the Italian Renzo Piano is most well-known for its 1977 design of the Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum in Paris. Before teaming up, Rogers was involved in another architectural partnership called... [more]

The short-lived partnership between the British Richard Rogers and the Italian Renzo Piano is most well-known for its 1977 design of the Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum in Paris. Before teaming up, Rogers was involved in another architectural partnership called Team 4, while Piano taught at the Milan Politecnico in Italy. The duo began working together in 1970 and designed a number of buildings in Italy and England. However, their claim to fame comes from the wildly iconoclastic, controversial, yet popular Centre Pompidou museum. Looking at the building, one suspects that Piano and Rogers didn't really care that it was intended to be a museum of modern art and a library. Resembling a mutated oil refinery -- complete with external piping, support struts, escalator tubes, and permanent scaffolding -- the building conveys no immediate sense of cultural purpose or meaning. Yet the public loves it. The design is playful and expresses a quality of openness. Its accessibility is made explicit by the way the building exposes its guts to view. Instead of hiding vents, ducts, and pipes, Rogers and Piano put them out for all to see. Built according to the philosophy of Archigram, the building implies a kind of social pluralism, explicitly intended to appeal to the popular imagination rather than some elitist sense of high culture. [show less]