Quotes by Renzo Piano

“A museum, ... is a place where one should lose ones head -- and I hope you will lose it.”

“because the center of the composition is not a building, but an empty space.”

“Now this is the fourth layer.”

“We chose steel and extra wide panels of glass, which is almost like crystal. These are honest materials that create the right sense of strength and clarity between old and new, as well as a sense of transparency in the center of the institution that opens the campus up to the street.”

“The north hill is devoted to Paul Klee the musician and teacher, the central hill to the painter and poet and the south hill to the researcher and mathematician.”

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

In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you dont have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.

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.

As an architect, you have to provide a shelter to enjoy art. And you have to love art. Its like when you make a concert hall. You must love music. This is the reason why you make the space, to enjoy music - making a space for art is the same thing.

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.

Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people dont read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.

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

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

In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.

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.

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.

I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.

When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

Enjoying art is a personal matter. Its made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.

I dont want to be romantic, but one of the most important things is to have happy buildings... its like having a family with a lot of children.