Renzo Piano – architect
Designer of innovative buildings is now an Italian senator
Award-winning architect Renzo Piano was born on this day in 1937 in Genoa. Piano is well-known for his high-tech designs for public spaces and is particularly famous for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which he worked on in collaboration with the British architect, Richard Rogers, and the Shard in London. Among the many awards and prizes Piano has received for his work are the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture in 1995, the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998 and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2008. Piano was born into a family of builders and graduated from the Polytechnic in Milan in 1964. He completed his first building, the IPE factory in Genoa, in 1968 with a roof of steel and reinforced polyester. He worked with a variety of architects, including his father, Carlo Piano, until he established a partnership with Rogers, which lasted from 1971-1977. They made the Centre Georges Pompidou look like an urban machine with their innovative design and it immediately gained the attention of the international architectural community. Read more…
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Dante Alighieri – poet
Famous son of Florence remains in exile
Dante Alighieri, an important poet during the late Middle Ages, died on this day in 1321 in Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna. Dante’s Divine Comedy is considered to be the greatest literary work written in Italian and has been acclaimed all over the world. In the 13th century most poetry was written in Latin, but Dante wrote in the Tuscan dialect, which made his work more accessible to ordinary people. Writers who came later, such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, followed this trend. Therefore Dante can be said to have played an instrumental role in establishing the national language of Italy. His depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in the Divine Comedy later influenced the works of John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer and Lord Alfred Tennyson, among many others. Dante was also the first poet to use the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, terza rima. Dante was born around 1265 in Florence into a family loyal to the Guelphs. By the time he was 12 he had been promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, the daughter of a member of a powerful, local family. He had already fallen in love with Beatrice Portinari, whom he first met when he was only nine. Read more…
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Tiziano Terzani - journalist
Asia correspondent who covered wars in Vietnam and Cambodia
The journalist and author Tiziano Terzani, who spent much of his working life in China, Japan and Southeast Asia and whose writing received critical acclaim both in his native Italy and elsewhere, was born on this day in 1938 in Florence. He worked for more than 30 years for the German news magazine Der Spiegel, who took him on as Asia Correspondent in 1971, based in Singapore. Although he wrote for other publications, including the Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, it was Der Spiegel who allowed him the freedom he craved. To a large extent he created his own news agenda but in doing so offered a unique slant on the major stories. He was one of only a handful of western journalists who remained in Vietnam after the liberation of Saigon by the Viet Cong in 1975 and two years later, despite threats to his life, he reported from Phnom Penh in Cambodia after its capture by the Khmer Rouge. He lived at different times in Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and New Delhi. His stay in China came to an end when he was arrested and expelled in 1984 for "counter-revolutionary activities". Read more…
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Vittorio Gui – composer and conductor
Precise and sensitive musician enjoyed a long and distinguished career
Internationally renowned orchestra conductor Vittorio Gui was born on this day in 1885 in Rome. Gui composed his own operas, while travelling around Italy and Europe conducting the music of other composers. He spent many years conducting in Britain and served as the musical director of the Glyndebourne Festival for 12 years. He was taught to play the piano by his mother when he was a young child. He graduated in Humanities at the University of Rome and then studied composition at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. The premiere of his opera, David, took place in Rome in 1907. He made his professional conducting debut at the Teatro Adriano in Rome in the same year, having been brought in as a substitute to lead Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. This led to Gui being invited to conduct in Rome and Turin. Arturo Toscanini then invited him to conduct Salome by Richard Strauss as the season opener at La Scala in Milan in 1923. He conducted at the Teatro Regio in Turin between 1925 and 1927 and premiered his own fairytale opera, Fata Malerba, there. Gui founded the Orchestra Stabile in Florence and developed the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino festival. Read more…
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Book of the Day: Piano, by Philip Jodidio
While some architects have a signature style, Renzo Piano seeks to apply coherent ideas to extraordinarily different projects. His buildings impress as much for their individual impact as for their diversity of scale, material, and form. Piano rose to international prominence with his codesign of the Pompidou Center in Paris, described by The New York Times as a building that “turned the architecture world upside down.” Since then, he has continued to craft many high-profile cultural spaces, including the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Morgan Library Renovation and Expansion in New York; and, most recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art, an asymmetric nine-story structure in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with both indoor and outdoor galleries. In New York and London, the Renzo touch has also transformed the skyline with the towers of the New York Times Building and the Shard, the tallest building in the European Union. Piano is an essential introduction that travels from Osaka, Japan, to Bern, Switzerland, and through many cities, structures, and islands in between, to explore the staggering scope of the Renzo Piano repertoire. From the “inside-out” Pompidou to the airy shells of the Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, this is a thrilling journey through the beauty of architecture, where, in Piano’s own words, “each time, it is like life starting all over again.”Philip Jodidio studied art history and economics at Harvard and edited Connaissance des Arts for over 20 years. His books include the Homes for Our Time series for publishers Taschen and monographs on numerous major architects, including Norman Foster, Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, and Zaha Hadid.
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