Renzo Piano Quotes

• You can put down a bad book; you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot miss the ugly tower block opposite your house.

  Renzo Piano

  Block, Book, Opposites

  Renzo Piano (1999). “The Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1998: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Prize : Presented to Renzo Piano”

  107 Copy quote

• One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

  Renzo Piano

  Badass, Bad Ass, Architecture

  152 Copy quote

• As an architect you are a builder. You are of course more than a builder. You need to be a militant, you have to be a poet, you have to be a visionary, you have to be an artist. But certainly you have to be a builder. Everything starts from there.

  Renzo Piano

  Artist, Needs, Visionaries

  101 Copy quote

• Light has not just intensity, but also a vibration, which is capable of roughening a smooth material, of giving a three-dimensional quality to a flat surface.

  Renzo Piano

  Light, Giving, Quality

  Renzo Piano (1997). “Logbook”

  104 Copy quote

• Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things.

  Renzo Piano

  Art, Mean, Technology

  136 Copy quote

• Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.

  Renzo Piano

  Badass, Fighting, Bad Ass

  96 Copy quote

• When a man is not satisfied with a house where he
  lives, he becomes an architect

  Renzo Piano

  Men, House, Architect

  85 Copy quote

• Architects have to dream, we have to search for our Atlantises, to be explorers, adventurers, and yet to build responsibly and well.

  Renzo Piano

  Dream, Architect, Wells

  88 Copy quote

• Architecture is art, but art vastly contaminated by many other things. Contaminated in the best sense of the word – fed, fertilised by many things.

  Renzo Piano

  Art, Architecture, Feds

  61 Copy quote

• Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

  Renzo Piano

  Beautiful, Years, Cities

  77 Copy quote

• A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

  Renzo Piano

  Museums, Architect, Should

  "8 Unconventional - And Brilliant - Ideas for Getting Over a Breakup" by Kate Friedman, www.glamour.com. June 1, 2017.

  57 Copy quote

• You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony

  Renzo Piano

  Criticism, Architecture, Harmony

  "The Shard: Renzo Piano's great glass elevator". Interview With Steve Rose, www.theguardian.com. June 13, 2012.

  61 Copy quote

• If you have total freedom, then you are in trouble. It's much better when you have some obligation, some discipline, some rules. When you have no rules, then you start to build your own rules.

  Renzo Piano

  Piano, Discipline, Trouble

  92 Copy quote

• In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.

  Renzo Piano

  Art, Writing, Past

  59 Copy quote

• A builder is like a little god - somebody who does things, doesnt just draw things.

  Renzo Piano

  Doe, Littles, Draws

  38 Copy quote

• I dont remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

  Renzo Piano

  Childhood, Way, Remember

  "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" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. November 21, 2005.

  36 Copy quote

• Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you're doing. You have to be sure about what you're doing.

  Renzo Piano

  Art, People, Design

  48 Copy quote

• Knowing how to do things not just with the head, but with the hands as well: this might seem a programmatic and ideological goal. It is not. It is a way of safeguarding creative freedom.

  Renzo Piano

  Hands, Knowing, Goal

  41 Copy quote

• There is something about giving everything to your profession. In Italian, an obsession is not necessarily negative. Its the art of putting all your energy into one thing; its the art of transforming even what you eat for lunch into architecture.

  Renzo Piano

  Art, Italian, Lunch

  47 Copy quote

• My inspiration came from the land, ... and, of course, from Paul Klee . . . and the poetics of his paintings.

  Renzo Piano

  Inspiration, Land, Painting

  36 Copy quote

• When you walk 25-30 feet above ground, it is a miracle, because you are still in the city ... but you are flying above the city. You are in the middle of trees, and that is a moment of beauty.

  Renzo Piano

  Cities, Feet, Tree

  34 Copy quote

• A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand.

  Renzo Piano

  Space, Parks, Empty

  32 Copy quote

• London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

  Renzo Piano

  Design, World, London

  33 Copy quote

• Every year I spend one month just sailing, but I still work when Im on the boat. You never separate work from leisure. A boat is like a magic world, like a little island.

  Renzo Piano

  Islands, Years, Sailing

  27 Copy quote

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