+
From: Architexturez <interface.services@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 23:12:22 +0530
Q: What can be done to improve the suburbs of Paris? A: People are
starting to understand that the real challenge is to turn peripheries
into cities
Renzo Piano, by reputation among the world's greatest architects, tells
Emma Brockes why cities have been betrayed
Monday November 21, 2005
The Guardian
....
The Renzo Piano Building Workshop is not the largest firm of architects
in the world, but its commissions are among the most prestigious. Since
he made his name, aged 33, by codesigning the Pompidou Centre in Paris
with Richard Rogers, Piano has laboured to combine his skills as an
architect with his political and sociological theories. He abhors the
word "style", which he calls a form of narcissism, and declines to find
any consistent theme in his work. The only thing that links the Paul
Klee museum in Bern, the Kansai International airport terminal in Osaka
and the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin is Piano's belief
that architecture has a duty "to suggest behaviour". In the light of the
Paris riots, he says, cities have been failed by architects as much as
by politicians.
cont'd....
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1647127,00.html