Winner of the first Möbius Prize - multimedia ebook category, the exclusive Abitare - Being Renzo Piano is an account of “the world as seen through the eyes of Renzo Piano” by Abitare magazine, the internationally renowned and popular monthly magazine of architecture, interiors and design. Go and track the great architect’s travels, his frequent visits to construction sites and his daily business at his offices in Paris, Genoa and New York. See in real time the work in progress – sketches, drawings, pictures and models in a rich and comprehensive photo feature.

The material is interspersed with travel notes, conversations between Renzo Piano and the people he works with, meetings with personalities from the international cultural scene, visits to sites and even moments of rest. Rather like a movie script, Abitare - Being Renzo Piano breaks down into a series of main episodes: a journey punctuated by a sequence of actual events and a parallel plot of prior happenings and in-depth developments offering a clearer, broader meaning through a series of “direct takes” on “Piano’s thinking”, short reports and other impromptu contributions from outside observers. “Abitare - Being Renzo Piano offers for the first time a close-up snapshot of the daily life of one of the leading players on the architecture scene. A snapshot that sheds new light on the inner workings of the remarkable design and production machine Renzo Piano has set in motion, by documenting the main designs currently in progress in real time,” explains Abitare’s editor-in-chief Stefano Boeri. “The ‘tracking’ process could only happen because Renzo Piano was so completely willing to be followed around in his travels as a builder of ‘world cities’ and to be observed, from a quite unique point of view, as he went about his day-to-day business as a charismatic head of his workshop-studios in Paris, Genoa and New York”.

“Among the sites visited with Renzo Piano, Abitare - Being Renzo Piano photographs and discusses: Malta, Athens, Ronchamp, Paris and Venice in Europe; Cambridge, Boston, New York, Chicago, Fort Worth, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the United States, documenting, in particular, the designs for: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre; Valletta City Gate; the Convent of the Poor Clares; Fondation Pathé; the Modern Wing of the Art Institute; the California Academy of Sciences; New Columbia University Campus; the extension to the Kimbell Art Museum; Harvard Art Museum; the Masterplan for the new Allston campus, Harvard University; the Vedova Foundation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

* Introduction

* Everything in a photo: Renzo Piano in ten shots, by Giovanna Silva

* "We make things which make cities": An interview by Stefano Boeri to Renzo Piano

* The journey

* Book in progress: The Renzo Piano's own big book of memory and forgetting

* RPBW Genoa: Renzo Piano's Building Workshop in Genoa

* RPBW Paris: Renzo Piano's Building Workshop in Paris

* RPBW New York: Renzo Piano's Building Workshop in New York

* "And you, how many Pritzkers have you won?": Frank O. Gehry meets Renzo Piano at the Milan Triennale conversation collected by Matteo Poli

* Questions to Renzo Piano: Claudio Abbado, Alejandro Aravena, Roberto Benigni, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Vittorio Gregotti, Italo Lupi, Mohsen Mostafavi, Ermanno Olmi, Claude Parent, Richard Rogers, Edoardo Sanguineti, Mario Vargas Llosa

* Abitare Piano: A word from someone who live in a Renzo Piano home, by Maria Giulia Zunino

* Beaubourg BD: Phenomenology of the Pompidou Centre through cartoon strips, by Caterina Grimaldi

* The RPBW Machine: How RPBW works interviews, by Anna Foppiano

* Video interview: Conference at Sala Buzzati, Corriere della Sera, November 5, 2009

COMING SOON
* PianoCity: A city and 40 years of projects, by Salottobuono