Renzo Piano Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We chose steel and extra wide panels of glass, which is almost like crystal. These are honest materials that create the right sense of strength and clarity between old and new, as well as a sense of transparency in the center of the institution that opens the campus up to the street.

The north hill is devoted to Paul Klee the musician and teacher, the central hill to the painter and poet and the south hill to the researcher and mathematician.

because the center of the composition is not a building, but an empty space.

A museum, ... is a place where one should lose one's head -- and I hope you will lose it.

I dont remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

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

A builder is like a little god - somebody who does things, doesnt just draw things.

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.

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.

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.

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

Architecture is art, but art vastly contaminated by many other things. Contaminated in the best sense of the word – fed, fertilised by many things.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things.

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