“Teaching keeps you alive because it is a constant exchange; it is a prize, a better prize than all the medals they can give you. With all due respect to medals”.
Renzo Piano does not want to make grand theories, he says, nor does he feel like a textbook professor; but the experience of seven decades as a protagonist is what he wants to share, and this is the substance of “Lezioni di Piano”, a 6-part series broadcast on Italian channel Rai5.

The format is as simple as it is powerful: 6 projects of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop are the subject of a discussion between the architect and the students, who are to propose a contemporary update. This is the “Laboratorio Arte del Costruire” (Art of Building Workshop) that was held at the School of Architecture, Urbanism and Civil Engineering of Politecnico di Milano during the last academic year, promoted by the Politecnico and the Renzo Piano Foundation.

Renzo Piano

The first case study is the Emergency Hospital in Entebbe, Uganda: a project completed in 2015, which the students propose to expand in response to new post-pandemic needs, confronting them with the design of a tensile structure that has to be functional, livable and, precisely for these reasons, beautiful.

And here comes the first critical point: “When people talk about beauty, they seem to be talking about something frivolous, which is absolutely not the case. In the context of a work of subtraction, since what is not there cannot be broken – and in the Entebbe hospital scenario this detail is crucial – beauty remains a primary factor: just as in ancient Greece hospitals were conceived as places of beauty for curative purposes, so Gino Strada, after centuries of scientific progress (and abandonment of beauty), had asked: “Make me a scandalously beautiful hospital”.

With the Kansai Airport in Japan, the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa (New Caledonia), the Whitney Museum, the Fondation Beyeler and the New York Times Building on the agenda for the next episodes, one can only expect a high level of debate. The format, curated by Francesca Molteni and produced by Muse Factory of Projects (directed by Davide Fois), is enriched by visits to the Renzo Piano Foundation in Genoa and contributions from guests such as John Elkann, photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin, journalist Michele Serra and Fabiola Gianotti, physicist and Director General of Cern in Geneva.

It will be interesting to see how the Lezioni di Piano team sticks to the conclusions of the first episode, a phrase as simple in form as it is complex in content: “Architecture does not only respond to needs. It also responds to desires”.