Renzo Piano

Piano was born and raised in Genoa, Italy, into a family of builders. His grandfather had created a masonry enterprise, which had been expanded by his father, Carlo Piano, and his father's three brothers, into the firm Fratelli Piano. The firm prospered after World War II, constructing houses and factories and selling construction materials. When his father retired, the enterprise was led by Renzo's older brother, Ermanno, who studied engineering at the University of Genoa. Renzo studied architecture at the University of Florence and Polytechnic University of Milan. He graduated in 1964 with a dissertation about modular coordination (coordinazione modulare) supervised by Giuseppe Ciribini and began working with experimental lightweight structures and basic shelters.

Piano taught at the Polytechnic University from 1965 until 1968, and expanded his horizons and technical skills by working in two large international firms, for the modernist architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and for the Polish engineer Zygmunt Stanisław Makowski in London. He completed his first building, the IPE factory in Genoa, in 1968, with a roof of steel and reinforced polyester, and created a continuous membrane for the covering of a pavilion at the Milan Triennale in the same year. In 1970, he received his first international commission, for the Pavilion of Italian Industry for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. He collaborated with his brother Ermanno and the family firm, which manufactured the structure. It was lightweight and original composed of steel and reinforced polyester, and it appeared to be simultaneously artistic and industrial.

The 1970 Osaka structure was greatly admired by the British architect Richard Rogers, and in 1971 the two men decided to open their own firm, Piano and Rogers, where they worked together from 1971 to 1977. The first project of the firm was the administrative building of B&B Italia, an Italian furniture company, in Novedrate, Como, Italy. This design featured suspended container and an open bearing structure, with the conduits for heating and water on the exterior painted in bright colors (blue, red and yellow). These unusual features attracted considerable attention in the architectural world, and influenced the choice of the jurors who selected Piano and Rogers to design the Pompidou Center.

Piano founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) in 1981. In 2017 it had 150 collaborators in offices in Paris, Genoa, and New York.

In 2004, he became head of the Renzo Piano Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of the architectural profession. Since June 2008, the headquarters has been co-located with his architectural office at Punta Nave, near Genoa.

After his nomination as Senator for Life in 2013, an honour limited to five office holders in the sole gift of the Italian President, Renzo Piano set up a team of young architects called G124 whose mission is to work on the transformation of Italy's major cities' suburbs. Team members are paid with Renzo Piano senator's salary and change every year through a public selection. Projects have been developed in Turin, Milan, Padua, Venice and Rome.

Piano resides in Paris with his second wife Milly and four children, Carlo, Matteo, Lia – from his first wife – and Giorgio.

Since April 2023 he has been a member of the board of directors of the Agnelli Foundation.

In 2026, Piano said he avoided giving Parisian taxi drivers his name for years after the Centre Pompidou opened, since its design was not uniformly popular. He added that he hoped his Tour Montparnasse redesign would not have that effect, and he didn't think it would.

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, Greece (2016)

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) in Athens, Greece is one of Piano's most dramatic projects. Located next to Falirio Bay at Kalithea, an ancient Greek port, four kilometres (2.5 mi) south of central Athens, on a site which served as a parking lot for the 2004 Summer Olympics, it combines the Greek National Library and a new opera house for the Greek National Opera along with the Stavros Niarchos Park, an urban park covering an area of 210,000 m2 (2,300,000 sq ft). An artificial hill was created to raise the building and give it a view of the nearby sea. The opera house has a 1400-seat main theater and a smaller "black box" theater of 400 seats. On top of the opera house a square horizontal glass box is placed, called Pharos (Lighthouse), similar to the perch of the art museum atop the Lingotto factory in Turin. The entire structure is covered by a single flat roof, which provides shade, and which is covered with 10,000 m2 (110,000 sq ft) of photovoltaic cells, generating 1.5 megawatts of electricity, designed to the building self-sufficient in energy during working hours. The cost of the project was 588 million dollars.