By Hugh Pearman. Published in The Sunday Times, March 31, 2002, as “Tower Play”.
The studious-looking man in the wire-rimmed specs and grey tweed jacket, breakfasting in the first-floor café of the Royal Institute of British Architects, is just another workaday London architect sporting the ever-popular geography-master look, you’d assume. But there’s something about the distinguished grey hair and neat, almost white, beard, that is not quite of London W1. In fact, it is of Genoa via Paris. This is Renzo Piano, one of the most highly-regarded architects in the world today. And now with two big projects in London. One very high profile indeed, the other virtually unknown.
Piano is a legend among architects: the man who, with our own Richard Rogers, won the 1971 competition to build the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and never looked back. An architect so versatile he can replan the centre of Berlin with one hand, and with the other design a radically different, all-timber cultural centre for the remote South Pacific island of New Caledonia. And the man who has designed - and just received planning permission for - Europe’s tallest tower, a £350m stretched pyramid to be built by London Bridge station in London. Is Britain finally to receive a Piano masterpiece?
