Word: pianos
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...Read about Renzo Piano's design for the California Academy of Sciences...
...blades. Those are angled to obstruct southern light while admitting gentler northern light, then deliver it to the third-floor galleries through translucent fabric screens. From outside, it also tops off the building's silhouette with a final flourish: a thin wafer of aluminum afloat on slender steel trusses. Piano likes to call it the "flying carpet...
...Piano has placed floor-to-ceiling glass walls at the north and south ends of his building, which introduce light directly into some of the galleries through a scrim that can be raised on overcast days. The window walls also admit some powerful views of Millennium Park, including a huge vista of the billowing steel panels of Frank Gehry's wonderful Pritzker band shell, which comes at you like a breaker on the beach at Santa Monica...
...contorted form and elaborate surfaces dropped out of Piano's vocabulary long ago, within just a few years of his and Richard Rogers' completion of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977. His allegiance is to the working principles of classic Modernism, and in this case with a nod to Chicago Modernism, which he references everywhere. By its horizontal thrust the Modern Wing harks back to the Prairie-style architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Its three adjacent bays of glass wall at the end of each floor bear trace elements of the tripartite "Chicago window" that...
...goes without saying that Gehry's pinwheeling band shell in Millennium Park couldn't be more unlike Piano's firm Cartesian box. Seeing them across from each other makes you think of those neighborhoods in Rome where the Baroque rubs shoulders with the classical, but with the difference that the Gehry and the Piano were built just a few years apart. Now they face each other as signs of the immense range of architectural practice these days - and of the fact that there's more than one road to the peak...