Stephen Kieran, in his essay, The Architecture of Plenty describes how architects in the present century are considered to be a commodity; they are known for their special skills, which come of great use when designing buildings.[i] People prefer branded items because they expect a certain style or feature from it. Similarly, people in professions that are criticized by the public need to have their own personal style, in order to call it theirs. According to Kieran, there are certain special features and styles each architect has and portrays in their work, which makes their work a “brand” for that specific type of building i. For example, The Renzo Piano Building Workshop has been transformed into a brand for designing art museums because of its special style in lighting and green architecture.
Renzo Piano, founder of The Renzo Piano Building Workshop, claims to “love working with light elements, transparency and natural light”[ii]. He has also been implementing green architecture in a majority of his buildings, which has earned him the title of “The World’s Best Friend”[iii].
It is this certain style that compels him to implement particular special features in his designs, most of them being art museums- structures that call for a great deal of light and transparency. His buildings, such as the Zentrum Paul Klee, the Tjibaou Cultural centre, and California Academy of
sciences have given The Renzo Piano Building Workshop a brand name as a firm that specializes in designing unique and ‘light’ art museums. One of the buildings designed by Renzo Piano that plays with light is the Tjibaou Cultural Centre (see figs.1 and 2) in New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific. Not only is this structure constructed of bamboo, a rapidly regenerating plant, there are several ventilators in the building that help regulate the temperature (see fig. 3). The Tjibaou Cultural Centre takes the shape of ten cone-shaped wooden huts surrounded by the pine trees, referring to the culture of the Kanaks of New Caledonia.
An interesting structure by Piano would be the environmental changes for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, CA, which won several Urban Land Design awards (see figs. 4). By placing several solar panels on the roof, and planting over a million species of plants on it, this Academy is now the world’s greenest museum[iv].
A third example of how Piano seems to easily balance the two categories of cultures would be The Zentrum Paul Klee, a museum dedicated to the artist Paul Klee. Klee’s artwork (see fig. 5) had a slight stillness to it, which Piano used to his advantage. By comparing Klee’s ‘silence’ that was implemented in his artwork (see fig. 6) to the ‘silent’ waves of the sea and adding a touch of his personal style, he adds skylights and green roofs all over this museum, thus creating another architectural work of art [v].
Through his buildings, not only does Renzo Piano ingeniously create an appropriate mixture of mass culture and high culture, thus trying to bridge the gap between the two, as Andreas Huyssen writes in his essay After The Great Divide[vi], he subtly adds his personal style to every one of his buildings, each making it his own masterpiece, and thus popularizing his firm, creating the “brand” for art museums all over the world.
[i] Kieran, Stephen (1987) The Architecture of Plenty: Theory and Design in the Marketing Age, Harvard Architecture Review 6: 103-113
[ii] Piano, Renzo. Interview by Liz Martin. Personal interview. 16 Jan. 2006.
[iii] Ouroussof, Nicolai (May 13, 2009). "Renzo Piano Embraces Chicago". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-13.
[iv] About the Building." California Academy Of Sciences. www.calacademy.org/academy/building/
[v] Hui, Calvin. "Paul Klee Center Bern by Renzo Piano." Galinsky: People Enjoying Buildings Worldwide. www.galinsky.com/buildings/paulkleecenter/index.html
[vi] Huyssen, Andreas. After the great divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
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