I worked closely with Renzo Piano and his team for over 2 years curating a major exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, the first in the capital for nearly 30 years.

Renzo Piano is renowned for buildings across the globe, from The Shard in London to the New York Times Building and the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa. United by a characteristic sense of lightness, and an interplay between tradition and invention, function and context, Piano’s buildings soar in the public imaginations.

The exhibition followed Piano’s career, from the influence of his Genoese heritage and his rise to acclaim alongside friend and collaborator Richard Rogers with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to current projects still in the making. Focusing on 16 key buildings, it explored how the Renzo Piano Building Workshop designs buildings “piece by piece”, making deft use of form, material and engineering to achieve a precise and poetic elegance.

The exhibition included rarely seen drawings, models, photography, signature full-scale maquettes and a new film by Thomas Riedelsheimer that provided an intimate portrait of Piano and his work. At the heart of the exhibition was an imagined ‘Island’, created by RPBW bringing together nearly 100 of Piano’s projects. The central room, also includes sixteen photographs of Piano since the 1980’s, taken by Gianni Berengo Gardin,

Exhibition designed by RPBW; Graphic Design by Studio Dyakova