HUMLEBAEK, DENMARK.- The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents “Renzo Piano - The Architect’s Studio,” on view through 28 September 2003. The last of The Architect’s Studio series of exhibitions at Louisiana presents the outstanding contemporary Italian architect Renzo Piano whose dedicated approach to construction and continued experimentation with modern materials have won him great international acclaim. In 1998 Renzo Piano received The Pritzker Prize – the Nobel Prize of architecture.

”Architecture is born out of its time, and has to be capable of expressing this. To do this it has to bring into play all the instruments available to it, gratitude towards the past as well as curiosity about the future.” (Renzo Piano)

In a series of exhibitions named The Architect’s Studio, the Louisiana Museum, in collaboration with the Margot and Thorvald Dreyer Foundation, has focused on some of the most innovative and influential architects of today. Having so far included Frank O. Gehry, Henning Larsen and Norman Foster, this architectural series has been conceived as studio exhibitions, offering insight into each architect’s formal concepts, working processes and sources of inspiration. The Louisiana Museum has long wished to complete this series of exhibitions with a presentation of the Italian architect Renzo Piano, born in 1937 in Genoa, and his Building Workshop, so very representative of the theme of this series: the studio as the creative unit.

More than 20 years ago, Renzo Piano founded his firm, The Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), consisting of two studios, one in Genoa and one in the heart of Paris. These two centres direct numerous projects scattered around the world. Piano’s choice of name for his firm, Building Workshop, is a direct reference to the Renaissance workshop, the bottega, where artists worked together with their apprentices in a busy atmosphere devoted to creativity and learning. At RPBW, architecture students have always participated actively in the firm’s building projects. The studios constitute a sort of miniature international architecture academy where students and graduates work together with experienced architects and other experts as a team, and in this way are given a chance to witness the practical realization of theory and ideas.

Renzo Piano’s work is characterized by a remarkable typological diversity of buildings, materials and structures. Throughout his career, Piano has aimed for an architecture defined by humanistic concerns and technical sophistication. Another feature that unites his work is a great sensitivity to the Genius Loci - the spirit of a place, its particular culture and characteristics - coupled with functional analysis and constructional daring. Though each project pushes the envelope of technology, this is always done with great consideration for local conditions.

In crafts as well as in art, the point of departure has traditionally always been models. Models allow you to work with a specific goal in mind and at the same time to experiment. This is why the two workshops in Genoa and Paris where Piano’s models are built play a major part – mentally as well as practically. Both studios are filled with models of all sizes – complete models as well as fragments. They stand or lie on tables, shelves and floors, or hang in bundles from the ceiling like strange creatures. They are the workshop’s history and memory, an important part of its aesthetic legacy. At Louisiana they constitute the main substance of the exhibition, transfering the atmosphere of Piano’s studios to the museum.

The exhibition will be installed in the museum’s Column Gallery and Hall Gallery. Here models, videos, other audio-visual material and photostats will allow visitors to see advanced methods of construction and unexpected materials employed within the same ecological space, whether it be housing projects, museums, concert halls or cultural centres. The work described ranges from such mega-structures as the Kansai Airport Terminal – the world’s largest - in Osaka Bay, Japan, to major, urban renewal projects in Paris, the recent reconstruction of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and the uniquely empathetic creation of the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia in the Pacific.

The exhibition catalogue for The Architect’s Studio: Renzo Piano features a foreword by exhibition organizer Kjeld Kjeldsen; an essay by Aymeric Lorenté on the studios in Genoa and Paris and on collaboration and teamwork at RPBW; and an essay by Deyjan Sudjic, editor of the influential architectural review “Domus” and chief curator of last year’s architecture biennial in Venice, who describes Renzo Piano as the great contemporary Italian architect. The catalogue furthermore contains a survey of Renzo Piano’s major works, in the form of a pictorial essay, and a biography.

The Renzo Piano exhibition concludes The Architect’s Studio series which in the course of the past five years has included Frank O. Gehry, Henning Larsen and Norman Foster. The Renzo Piano catalogue can be purchased separately or together with the three previous Architect’s Studio catalogues in a box set, priced at 398 DKK.

Louisiana Magasin vol. 9 (in Danish only) will feature an article entitled ”Renzo Piano – A View from the Winter Garden” by curator Michael Juul Holm.

The exhibition The Architect’s Studio: Renzo Piano is the result of close collaboration between the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Louisiana Museum, represented by curator and architect Kjeld Kjeldsen.

DONG is the main sponsor of exhibitions at Louisiana in 2001-2005.