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Renzo Piano Building Workshop: The Latest Architecture and News

Renzo Piano Building Workshop Presents Concept Designs for Series of Hospitals in Greece

The Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) has presented their preliminary design approaches for three hospitals in Greece. Part of a €200 million ($240 million) healthcare initiative launched by the Greek government, RPBW will produce designs for a General Hospital of Kromotini, a Children’s Hospital in Thessaloniki, and the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens which will also form part of the University’s Faculty of Nursing.

The three schemes are united by a “people-centric” approach, with each project seeking to integrate into their natural environments with an emphasis on natural light. The projects will follow the design ethos of the Stavros Niarchos Foundational Cultural Center by RPBW, completed in 2016.

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15 Impressive Atriums (And Their Sections)

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Offices and cultural buildings both offer the perfect opportunity to design the atrium of your dreams. These central spaces, designed to allow serendipitous meetings of users or to help with orientation in the building, are spacious and offer a lot of design freedom. Imposing scales, sculptural stairs, eccentric materials, and indoor vegetation are just some of the resources used to give life to these spaces. To help you with your design ideas, below we have gathered a selection of 15 notable atriums and their section drawings.

Updates Released of Renzo Piano's First Residential Project in the United States

New details have been released of Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s first residential building in the United States; a landmark luxury condominium scheme on Miami’s North Beach. Designed in collaboration with interior architects Rena Dumas Architecture Intérieure (RDAI) and landscape firm West 8, the 66-unit scheme seeks to embrace both the ocean and adjacent 35-acre park, with a fluid design to “blur the line between imagination and craftsmanship.”

The architectural concept behind the scheme, titled “Eighty Seven Park,” was to create a “coastal sanctuary” floating above the lush landscape of North Shore Park. Though simple in form and motif, Piano’s design prioritizes an intricate attention to detail; “the belief in perfecting every element of its design and construction.”

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Renzo Piano Building Workshop's First Canadian Project Will Be the New Toronto Courthouse

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Rendering by PIXELFLAKES. Image © Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in partnership with NORR Architects & Engineers, has been selected to design the new Toronto Courthouse, to be located adjacent to Nathan Phillips Square and Toronto City Hall in the city’s downtown civic core. When finished, it will be Piano’s first competed project in Canada.

Renzo Piano: Instinctive Pleasure in Lightness

“Lightness and transparency are very close friends. You start from something and then you take off, you take off, you take off... And at a certain point you have to stop taking off, otherwise, everything falls down. If you do this you find that there’s a kind of beauty there. It’s a beauty that is profound, it’s not cosmetic.”

In this video by Luis Fernández-Galiano, Italian architect Renzo Piano talks about his path to finding beauty in lightness and transparency. This clip is a part of a full documentary and interactive booklet series by Fundación arquia and produced by White Horse.

Migliore+Servetto Installation Lights Up Renzo Piano Skyscraper in Turin, Italy

A dynamic, pulsating installation is lighting up Renzo Piano's Intesa Sanpaolo skyscraper in Turin, Italy. Designed by Migliore+Servetto Architects, the installation is part of Turin's "Luci d'Artista," an annual, open-air light exhibition illuminating the squares and streets of the city.

New Renderings Revealed of Renzo Piano's Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles

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© Renzo Piano Building Workshop/©A.M.P.A.S. Images from L'Autre Image

New renderings have been revealed of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop-designed Academy of Motion Pictures as the project races toward its 2019 completion date. Located along LA’s Miracle Mile, the museum is striving to become “the world’s premier institution dedicated to the art and science of movies.”

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The Importance of The Sketch in Renzo Piano's Work

Through his sketches, Renzo Piano communicates the true intentions of his projects, pointing to the specific concepts that will become the protagonists of his works, including concern for the human scale and comfort, solar studies, and dialogue with the immediate environment. We compile here ten projects by the architect accompanied by their sketches, through which it is possible to see how the 1998 Pritzker Prize winner takes his designs from paper to reality.

Gehry, Foster, Piano Lead Star-Studded Shortlist in London Centre for Music Competition

Six internationally-acclaimed teams have been selected as finalists in a competition to design a new home for London Symphony Orchestra and Guildhall School of Music & Drama to be known as the Centre for Music London.

Planned to contain a world-class concert hall, education, training and digital spaces, top-grade facilities for audiences and performers, and a number of supporting commercial areas, the Centre for Music building will become a new landmark within the heart of London, aimed at becoming “a place of welcome, participation, discovery and learning fit for the digital age.”

Look Inside a Collection of Parisian Architecture Offices, Photographed by Marc Goodwin and Mathieu Fiol

Architectural photographer Marc Goodwin, alongside Mathieu Fiol, has recently completed the fifth collection of his "ultra-marathon of photoshoots" – this time in la Ville Lumière, Paris. Following Goodwin's insight into the spaces occupied by Nordic architectural offices, his look at studios both large and small lived in by London-based practices, his lens on a collection of Beijing-based studios and, most recently, his and Felix Nybergh's study of studios in Seoul, the project has now focused on the French capital.

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23 Examples of Impressive Museum Architecture

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Designing a museum is always an exciting architectural challenge. Museums often come with their own unique needs and constraints--from the art museum that needs specialist spaces for preserving works, to the huge collection that requires extensive archive space, and even the respected institution whose existing heritage building presents a challenge for any new extension. In honor of International Museum Day, we’ve selected 23 stand-out museums from our database, with each ArchDaily editor explaining what makes these buildings some of the best examples of museum architecture out there.

Experience Renzo Piano's Valletta City Gate Through This Captivating Photo Series

Within the framework of the recent election of Malta to the Presidency of the Council of the European Union—a position that will be held through June 2017—architectural photographer Danica O. Kus has created a photo series detailing Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s Valletta City Gate in Malta.

Completed in 2014, the project is composed of four parts: the Valletta City Gate and site, an open-air theater “machine,” a Parliament building, and landscaped space. Experience the project in beautiful detail though the photo series, after the break.

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Renzo Piano Designs 36-Story Hotel and Apartment Tower in San Francisco

Plans for 555 Howard, a mixed-use hotel and residential tower to be located in San Francisco’s Transbay neighborhood, have been revealed by the city’s Planning Department. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop for developer Pacific Eagle, the 36-story tower would house 69 residential units and 255 hotel rooms, as well as a publicly-accessible open-air rooftop terrace. The project represents Piano’s second project in the city, following 2008’s California Academy of Sciences.

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Construction Underway on Renzo Piano's Columbia University Academic Center

Construction is now underway on Columbia University’s new University Forum and Academic Conference Center, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Dattner Architects. Located at the school’s new Manhattanville campus at the corner of West 125th Street and Broadway, the 55,980 square foot building will serve as a new home for academic conferences and a meeting place where scholars from many fields can gather to share ideas.

The 10 Best Global* Architecture Projects of 2016 (*Asia, Africa and South America Not Excluded)

As the common phrase attests, “history is written by the victors.” We therefore know that the story of the West is that of Europe and the United States, while the other actors in world history are minimized or invisible: it happened to the Chinese and Japanese during World War II, to the Ottoman Empire in sixteenth-century Europe, and to racial majorities in the common reading of Latin American independence. The same thing happens in architecture.

The current boom of the Global South is based not only on new work, but rather on the recognition of an invisible architecture which was apparently not worthy of publication in the journals of the 1990s. The world stage has changed, with the emergence of a humanity that is decentralized yet local; globalized, yet heterogeneous; accelerated, yet unbalanced. There are no longer red and blue countries, but a wide variety of colors, exploding like a Pollock painting.

This serves as a preamble to consider the outstanding projects of 2016 according to the British critic Oliver Wainwright, whose map of the world appears to extend from New York in the West to Oslo in the East, with the exception of Birzeit in Palestine. The Global South represents more than 40% of the global economy and already includes most of the world’s megacities, yet has no architecture worthy of recognition? We wanted to highlight the following projects in order to expand the western-centric world view, enabling us to truly comprehend the extent of architectural innovation on a global scale.

Two Buildings by Renzo Piano Near Completion at Columbia University's New Manhattanville Campus

The first stage of Columbia University’s new Manhattanville Campus, consisting of two buildings by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, is nearly complete, with a move-in and grand opening slated for spring 2017.

The Piano-designed Jerome L Greene Science Center and Lenfest Center for the Arts are the first two buildings to be completed within the larger campus masterplan, conceived by Piano in collaboration with SOM, that will eventually encompass nearly 19-acres between 125th and 133rd streets in northwestern Manhattan.

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The Consultant Behind the Guggenheim Bilbao on What Makes Good Architecture

This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as "The Connector."

Andy Klemmer has had a front-seat view of the making of some of the most important pieces of architecture of our time. The president and founder of the consulting firm Paratus Group, Klemmer was an essential part of the team that helped develop the iconic Guggenheim Bilbao. Since then, he’s gone on to consult on the California Academy of Science, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Kimbell Art Museum expansion, working with architects like Renzo Piano, Herzog & de Meuron, and SANAA (to name a few). By liaising between institutions and their chosen architects, he has unique insight into architecture, its practice, and that essential part of the architecture puzzle: the client.

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Barack Obama Presidential Center Selects Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

The Obama Foundation has selected Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA) with partner Interactive Design Architects (IDEA) to lead the design of the Obama Presidential Center for Chicago's South Side. Chosen from a shortlist including Diller Scofidio + Renfro, John Ronan Architects, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, SHoP Architects, Snøhetta and Adjaye Associates, TWBTA stood out for their “commitment to explore the best ways of creating an innovative center for action that inspires communities and individuals to take on our biggest challenges.”