Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano's architecture reflects that rare fusion of art, architecture and engineering in a truly remarkable synthesis, making his intellectual curiosity and problem-solving techniques as wide-ranging and far-reaching as those of the early masters of his native land, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. While his work embraces the most current technology of this era, his roots are clearly in the classical Italian philosophy and tradition. The architect is just as comfortable with historical precedents as he is with the latest technology, but he is also concerned with habitability and sustainable architecture in an ever-changing world.

Renzo Piano's range of buildings is astonishing in its scope and exhaustive in its diversity of scale, materials and forms. He is truly an architect whose sensibility represents the broadest range of this and previous centuries, informed by the modern masters who preceded him, going back even to Brunelleschi's 15th century, and who has remained true to the concept that the architect must maintain control over the building process from design to the built work. Piano values craftsmanship, not only manual but also computer craftsmanship, and has a great sensitivity for his materials, be it glass, metal, masonry or wood. These concepts, values and sensibilities are nothing new to someone whose father, uncles and grandfather were all builders.

By choosing a career as an architect rather than a builder, he may have broken with a family tradition in a sense, but he has, in fact, enhanced that tradition in a way that his ancestors could only have imagined.

Always restless and inventive, Piano has, throughout his three-decade career, relentlessly sought new dimensions in his structures, both literally and figuratively. His first Pompidou Centre in Paris, which was the first international recognition of his talent and promise, could have been a stylistic end in itself. Instead, Piano persevered with relentless experimentation that resulted in later works that included the Menil Museum in Houston, along with his exquisite incorporation of Cy Twombly, and the more recent Beyeler Museum in Switzerland. These three museums demonstrate his unerring sensitivity to site, context and a remarkable mastery of form, figure and space.

Piano proved himself a master of the huge project with Kansai, the world's largest air terminal in Osaka Bay, Japan, and again with the imposing Bercy Shopping Centre in Paris, as well as the huge and beautiful National Science Museum in Amsterdam. His football stadium in Bari (Italy) is unlike any other in the world, with its large swathes of blue sky interrupting the usual monotony of stadiums.

His versatility is evident in projects such as the magnificent, almost 300-metre-long bridge across Ushibuka Bay in southern Japan; the design of a 70,000-tonne luxury liner; an automobile; and his own transparent hillside workshop. All his works confirm his place in the annals of architectural history, and the future is even more promising.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize praises Renzo Piano's work in redefining modern and post-modern architecture. His interventions, contributions and continuous explorations to solve contemporary problems in a technological age add to the definition of the art of architecture.