Renzo Piano was born in Genoa in 1937 into a family of builders.
In 1964, he graduated from Milan Polytechnic’s School of Architecture.
Between 1965 and 1970 he worked with Louis I Kahn in Philadelphia, and ZS Makowsky in London. In 1971, he founded the agency Piano & Rogers with Richard Rogers, who was his partner on the Centre Pompidou project in Paris.
In 1977, he founded l’Atelier Piano & Rice with Peter Rice. He worked with Rice, an engineer, on many projects until his death in 1993. He then set up Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which has offices in Paris and Genoa and employs around 100 people.
He is a winner of two of the industry’s most prestigious accolades: the Pritzker Architecture Prize in the US and the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal.
