RPBW – Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Paris

Over the last fifty years, Renzo Piano has questioned the fundamentals of architectural practice to make it a participatory and harmonious experience where disciplinary boundaries disappear and the acts of imagining, designing, calculating and building are fused into an atelier now known throughout the world as the Renzo Piano Building Workshop-RPBW.

Through a selection of projects of different nature, scale and intended use, conceived first by Renzo Piano and then by RPBW, and thanks to the use of a simple, flexible and interactive display device, the exhibition traces the “ fil rouge ”, or common thread, that the office has woven over the decades, between drawings and project models, the dialogue with specialists from every sphere of art and science, and that marvellous workshop of making that is the building site. Retracing this thread means going back to the search for an intrinsically flexible space, ennobled by a play of transparencies, permeability and light. The search for the optimal container of this space has led RPBW to the challenge of conceiving a weightless architecture, to the constant optimisation of form and material and to the decomposition of the envelope into unique
 “ pieces ”, where high technology and craftmanship coexist.