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Royal Academy of Arts, London
Until 20 January 2019
'You become an architect to change the world, not to seduce it,' says Renzo Piano in a film playing in his first London retrospective since 1989. Maybe so, but as anyone who has ever encountered him knows, this architectural titan knows how to seduce anyone he meets. His personal charm has doubtless played a role in dealings with developers, mayors, review bodies - and reporters. This show is about the architecture, but stop to watch the film in the middle of the three galleries, and this charming man makes everything you see even better.
The show's other two galleries have been formatted with lots of objects hanging above tables busy with models, graphics and texts, and canvas chairs to sit in and study them. The information density is high, but rather than roadblock your progress, spatial arrangements and those chairs invite you to linger. At the opening, Piano described the set-up of the exhibition design - done jointly by the Royal Academy with Piano's practice Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) - as 'somewhere between a library and a natural science museum'. Gesturing at the cloud of suspended objects, he offered that these are like animals'. Perhaps more like skeletons - a long spine represents the 1.7km-long structure of Kansai International Airport, Osaka (1994), ribs show the porcelain brisesoleil tubes of the 52-storey New York Times Building (2007), a long-snouted skull with eye sockets is a miniature gerberette, the 8m-long steel element designed by crucial collaborator Peter Rice which transferred load in the external frame of Piano's breakthrough work with Richard Rogers, the Centre Pompidou (1977). A full-sized shiny red gerberette replica stands vertically outside the Academy's Burlington Gardens...