Renzo Piano: The Art of Making Buildings
Renzo Piano: The Art of Making Buildings
Exhibition
From The Shard in London to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the buildings of Renzo Piano have enriched cities across the globe. The exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts revealed the vision and invention behind his pioneering work, showing how architecture can touch the human spirit.
Piano’s work is united by a sense of lightness and an interplay between tradition and invention, function and context. Upon visiting the Renzo Piano Building Workshop just outside of Genoa, we were inspired by the architect’s large-scale drawings and models, which convey a sense of lightness. We developed a calligraphic typeface reflecting the craftsmanship found in Piano’s oeuvre and used it to design the exhibition title. The latter was produced out of meticulously stained wood to match the colour of the architect’s models and hung slightly off the wall, which created a sense of space and light.
Similarly inspired by lightness, we developed a system to display captions made of floating angled wooden panels. The caption’s design was grid-based and modular, which offered a contrast to the rest of the identity.
2018
Portrait © Jérôme Bonnet for Le Monde
Architectural photography by Belén de Benito, Gerardo Vela
