2001.

At first glance this seems a rather undramatic exhibit for a quarter century of a major architect's work. After walking through the heroic optimism of the Centre Pompidou's renovated entry hall, one could be forgiven for expecting some supergraphics display or flashy computer stations with cinematic fly-throughs. Not here. The work is straightforwardly displayed on a series of tables, with drawings on panels hung from the ceiling. The exhibit instead draws one in piece by piece, each project unfolding with its own discovery, and this is only proper for the architecture it shows: projects of repeated sincerity, evolving from specific needs and reflecting their evolution in their final design. Instead of powerful imagery or scenographics the exhibit is most powerful as it asserts the importance of the craftsman's journey.

The Process

The exhibit forcefully demonstrates Piano's commitment to process. The tables display components from each project's development: a page from a sketchbook, a leaf found from a tree at the site, a series of study models of a structural connection - these objects on the exhibit's tables are displayed much more emphatically than any photos of the completed buildings.

I was struck by the varied models of connectors, and how Piano would evolve them toward a more integrated look. These studies are an indictment of the lack of imagination in conventional structural engineering. Piano models a structural connection, and it evolves based on its sculptural, tactile, poetic qualities -- a radically different approach than a quantitative analysis (determine load, select system, integrate structural system for desired look). Piano's structural solutions do not determine the visual, but rather the result is a dialectic between the two.

The show includes stress diagrams, not hipster nurbs renderings. This serious of purpose is akin to the creation of a tool. It is perhaps no accident that a photograph of his studio tools and his building elements, hanging on the wall together, are roughly indistinguishable.

The Component.

Piano's procedure follows the search for an appropriate building component, its testing, then its use thoroughly throughout the building. The result is an "ideal" component, and he attains the formal power of his buildings through aggregate sums of such pieces. As a corollary, this approach tends to create universalist spaces or surfaces that could continue indefinitely, and are weakest at the moment where the system ends (such as the end bay at San Giovanni Rotondo). This is not an architecture whose first priority is shaping spaces. The exhibit itself reflects this aggregate quality, as if the room's being twenty feet wider would have required two more project tables and a corresponding increase of work displayed.

The show leaves the impression that Piano does not respond to a project by a predetermined solution. Architect Peter Blackburn has spoken of Piano's work as "anti-banal" -- no building system is assumed or considered insignificant. The result requires work. Piano's architecture, as demonstrated throughout this exhibit in the sheer amount of experimentation shown toward developing his ideas, makes clear the axiom that to make anything of use in the world requires vast amount of capital, whether human, monetary, or material. Piano's grace is that he is particularly conservative with that capital.

I had just come from Chartres Cathedral when I saw Piano's exhibit and was struck by their similar spirit of searching. You can see in those stones the careful testing and measure of formal idea, as a great improvisation across centuries. The builders of Chartres risked failure; they did, at places, fail. But it took collapsing arches to make the gothic soar, and those tumbled stones are no less a part of the building's essence than had the vaults never been rebuilt. In this age we do not have the luxury of such flexibility.

Outside the exhibit one can stand in the Place Pompidou and take in the Centre Pompidou, Ircam, and Atelier Brancusi together. The buildings share iconic and monumental power, a power coming not from the specific need to create an icon but instead from the challenges specific to the building's idea. You feel in this work that Piano is responding to a purpose beyond higher even the individual clients he served, and they call to mind the expression that an architect's true responsibility is to the building. These buildings are not signatures, are not about being by Piano, nor are they in any way self-effacing because they are not about self. They are not about a cult of personality, and perhaps for this reason don't seem as dated as such monuments as the Portland Civic Center or Wexner Center.

The exhibit declares that Piano is our guardian of process, and we are in his debt for his explorations. His search echoes Rilke's advice in Letters to a Young Poet: "Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

Piano as an architect lacks a school in a conventional sense; he does not have followers imitating the formal language of his brand of "high-tech," for example. Rather the following he has is under surface. It is in a sense uncopiable, as even the next client doesn't know what he or she will get. This perhaps does not make for good coffee table books, just as Piano seems unconcerned with coffee table issues.

Piano's work is consistently evolutionary, an undetermined response, and continually explores architectural constants as they explore issues of urbanism, static forces, light, or enclosure. And each project evolves irrespective of context but influenced by it.

The crisis for Piano is the importance of having/not having an airport building -- nothing to do with who builds it. Piano's work evokes necessity for major undertakings.

2001.