Working From Memory: A Designer’s Nuts and Bolts

For Italian architect Renzo Piano, designer of the proposed Newport Harbor Art Museum, the key word is memory.

“Memory is the basis of all architecture,” he said. “Memory of the past, the present, and, if you like, of the future--in the sense of an intuition about what’s to come.”

Some places have too much memory, Piano observed, and others may have too little. “In Paris, where we built the high-tech machine of the Beaubourg (Pompidou Center) in the midst of one of the city’s most historic districts, it was necessary to fly in the face of the past. In Newport Harbor, which is so new, we have to invent a memory of the future.”

Piano explained his architectural philosophy on a recent visit to Los Angeles to present his schematic design to the Newport Harbor museum board and participate in a symposium on museum design at the Westweek conference at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center.

Speaking in a soft, musically accented and articulate English, the bearded designer described how he regards each project entirely on its own merits, without preconceptions.

“I start with the nuts and bolts,” he said, “in several senses of the expression. I look at the nuts and bolts of the landscape in which a building sits. I listen to the community involved in the project as they explain the nuts and bolts of their concerns. I discover the nuts and bolts of the collective memory. And, finally, I look at the nuts and bolts of the structural system that will express all these other aspects.”

Nuts and bolts figure prominently in Piano’s designs, which often resemble giant Erector sets with a makeshift mechanical air of temporary structures for a global society caught up in a tidal wave of transition.

The Pompidou Center is a steel and glass cage with its mechanical “entrails” of ductwork and escalators exposed on the exterior. Piano’s design for the Menil Museum in Houston, completed in 1987, is a minimalist box dominated by the leaflike concrete louvers of the overhead lighting.

“I have to say that the notion of the Beaubourg as a machine or factory has always filled me with joy,” Piano wrote in a foreword to a 1982 exhibition of his work in his native Genoa. “As my mentor Franco Albini liked to say, ‘Every work is a unique object, constructed with pieces that can be reproduced.’

“This mixture of the technological and the emotional, which I like to call a ‘contamination’-- contaminazione in Italian--is for me the essence of architecture.”

Multiple Contamination

In the design of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, the “contamination” is multiple, Piano explained. There is the interaction of the natural landscape and the man-made structure. There is the mix of the “pure” uses of the museum with its extra function to educate and entertain a public feeling its way toward cultural sophistication.

His response to Newport’s “contamination” is subtle. Nature and building are fused by creating a series of longitudinal walls he calls “dams” along the contours of the 12-acre site, sloping to the intersection of MacArthur Boulevard and East Coast Highway. Visitors will descend into the museum from the up-slope parking lot through a barrel-vaulted roof that lets muted natural light into the galleries.

The 75,000-square-foot museum also will house a library, bookstores, restaurants and an auditorium for lectures and chamber music concerts.

“In the Menil Museum, the building had to live up to an already established major collection,” Piano said. “At Newport, the collection will eventually live up to the architecture.”

Reading of Needs

Newport Museum director Kevin Consey described Piano’s design as “a brilliant and poetic interpretation of our program, a literal reading of our physical needs and artistic aspirations.”

Newport’s collection features post-World War II California art. It is, in Consey’s words, “a very young collection that needs to build strength from the clarity of our programs and our architecture.”

Piano was chosen to design the Newport museum for three key reasons: he approaches each project freshly, without preconceptions; he builds “beautiful buildings,” and his previous clients all recommended him highly as “that rare animal, an architect that listens,” Consey said.

The impetus behind the current plethora of new museum buildings, and the expansion of older galleries like New York’s Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art, and the L.A. County Museum of Art, is explained by Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes as “the tax-law-driven suction that constantly drives works of art out of the private sphere into the public. The time must come when all works of art made in America or owned by Americans must gravitate towards the museum.”

In the last two decades, viewing art also has become a popular pastime for the public. The older function of the art museum as a mausoleum for students and scholars has given way to the concept of a “cultural center” designed to serve citizens eager for uplift.

“This is another aspect of what I consider to be a healthy process of contamination--if I can say that in English,” Piano said. “It is the contamination of art by entertainment, of the elite, by the everyday, in which, as a typical bourgeois Marxist, I rejoice.”

Piano’s personal “contaminations” are not confined to the art museums that have made him an international design star. He has mixed many areas of design in the 25 years since he was graduated from Milan Polytechnic.

In the late ‘70s, he developed an experimental plastic-body car for Fiat. He has designed sets for educational television programs on architecture and shell-like synthetic roofing systems for pavilions at the Milan Triennale design exposition. Recently, he won the competition for the design of Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan, beating out an array of major architects.

Honored by British

The 51-year-old designer, awarded the prestigious 1989 Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, runs studios in Genoa and Paris and will open an office in Osaka. His three adult children are “grown up and scattered over Europe.” One son is studying architecture.

“I’ve also grown up,” Piano said. “In the 1960s, when I was designing the Beaubourg with Richard Rogers, I was architecture’s bad boy. I thumbed my nose at the petrified traditions of Parisian nostalgia, the overload of historical memory, and created a violent provocation in the form of a high-tech machine in the midst of Les Halles.

“Today, as a graybeard, I’ve come to relish memory--not as the sentimental nostalgias for a mythical past embodied in Postmodernism, but as a treasure house of shared human experiences architecture may spend to enrich its language.”