Renzo Piano's modernist mix of design and high-tech construction has earned the provocative Italian architect his field's highest honor

By DANIEL S. LEVY

he architect Renzo Piano comes from a family of builders: his grandfather, father, brother and uncles were contractors in Genoa, Italy. It was therefore assumed that the young Piano would join the clan's business. But when he turned 17, Piano announced that he dreamed of becoming an architect like Filippo Brunelleschi, the 15th-century artist whose ground-breaking engineering and designs resulted in Florence's soaring Duomo.

Piano may have eschewed the family firm, but in the 34 years since he graduated from the Milan Polytechnic School of Architecture, he has consistently paid loving homage to the family's ancestral ways of craftsmanship by using its traditions on his buildings. And like Brunelleschi, he has become a humanist architect who searches the regions of design as he flawlessly merges art and technology in exquisite structures. For his creations, the Hyatt Foundation in Chicago last week justly named Piano the 21st recipient of the coveted $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Piano first burst onto the international scene in 1977 as the provocative young architect who, with Britain's Richard Rogers, designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The modern art museum was unlike anything seen before in the French capital. "We wanted to create a place of curiosity and exploration," says Piano. He and Rogers therefore dropped in the middle of a staid neighborhood an organic, breathing machine with an exoskeletal steel structure on which they displayed the building's color-coded pipes, ducts, gantries and escalators. Piano and Rogers' ode to technology horrified the cultural establishment, just as the early modernist works hung inside once did. Ordinary folk, though, embraced it.

Others recognized Piano's talents: commissions for office towers, housing and luxury ocean liners started coming to the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa, the atelier Piano named in honor of his family. A decade after Pompidou, Piano received the chance to create his masterpiece, the Menil Collection building in Houston, Texas. "Each time the story you are telling is a different one, using a different expression," says Piano. That is the case with Menil, an understated building designed to house the artwork amassed by the collectors Dominique and John de Menil. Set in the midst of a museum village created by Dominique de Menil on the outskirts of Houston, Piano's building is the antithesis of the Centre Pompidou. It is at first glance a simple box, but up close its thin white steel colonnade and gray clapboard siding reveal it as a sparse, even monastic paean to Mies van der Rohe. With light washing through a series of curved light-deflecting ceiling louvers, across the galleries' white walls and over the collection of Paleolithic and contemporary pieces, the Menil is a sacred place, a shrine of silence, serenity and art.

While Pompidou was Piano's brashest building and the Menil his subtlest, the Kansai International Airport Terminal is his most monumental. The undulating structure is also the most playful airport creation since Eero Saarinen's winged TWA Terminal landed in New York in 1962. Set on a 525-hectare man-made island in Osaka Bay and opened in 1994, Kansai's 2-km steel and glass facade flows down the island like a futuristic space shuttle. The shimmering terminal with its centipedal docking wings, looking poised to soar over the bay, exudes the joy of travel.

With works in progress to reconstruct Potsdamer Platz in Berlin as well as an expansion to the Harvard University Art Museums, Piano seems prepared for what he calls the continued "adventurous application of tradition, modernity and invention." All are part of the path upon which he first embarked when, as a youth, he fell under the spell of the great Brunelleschi.