In Koen's never ending quest to kick the tumbleweeds and dust bunnies off me, he dangled Renzo Piano before me in a recent link, so I looked beyond the Pompidou Center, which I'm conflicted about, and read a bit, looked at a few pictures, and then clicked on Piano's slideshow of his workshop. Now, aside from liking most of what I saw and being flabbergasted (one of the truly wonderful words in the English language) by one or two where his facility with forms is equally virtuosic at the extremes of overwhelming visual complexity and utter visual simplicity, I have to ask about one called the Lingotto Factory Conversion. Is it as MAGNIFICIENT as the fleeting picture suggests? Talented photographers can, afterall, dramatize some buildings beyond what meets the eye when one comes face to face with some buildings. But some buildings, like Wright's Guggenheim or Falling Water, live up to their most flattering photographs in person. If in person this Lingotto Factory Conversion lives up to its photograph, then it is easily one of the greatest buildings I have ever seen. In alot of Piano's buildings, I can see him playing with form progressions the way a pianist might play with chord progressions and its all very, very fascinating. But something happened with the Lingotto Factory Conversion. Its like all of his formidable experimenting came together in a lighting bolt of design integration. The building transcends by becoming greater than the sum of its searching formal development. It is like the building equivalent of a Wegner chair or something. Has anyone seen this building? Can anyone tell me about it? What the hell was it before conversion? What the hell is it now? What kind of design Mt. Olympus did this guy go up on before coming down and doing this thing? If artists are the antennaes of the race, as poet Ezra Pound once said, the antennae called Renzo Piano has caught lightening in a sky very far in humanity's future and grounded it utterly without buffer in the present. I can't say it any other way: it is frightening beauty.
P.S: I apologize for not finding a free-standing picture of Lingotto. The link below is for the slideshow and Lingotto is quite far into the slideshow. Perhaps someone will know how to patch a more accessible picture. Regardless, one could do a lot worse than watching this Piano slideshow.
Poor flash user interface
While the Flash interface is quite kludgy you can navigate directly to the full portfolio for the Ligotto factory conversion which includes 20 images. As this is the sort of thing I used to design for a living I have a knack for figuring them out, follows these steps:
1) Mouse over the title
Renzo Piano Building Workshop
Beneath the title appear options RPBW/WORKS
2) Mouse directly to the word WORKS and
a drop down menu beneath lists two options:
Short list
All projects
Click on All projects
3) A world map appears. Roll over the green dots to find Italy. The word Italy appears in a balloon. Click on it. The map zooms in on italy
4) Roll over the green dots to Torino, Italy (upper left). A balloon pops up with three choices. Click on the third choice for the Ligotto Factory.
5) You get a single view of the factory and a text description. Click on the image and you get thumbnails of all the images of the project. Click on any of the thumbnails.
James, thank you...
I WAS fooled by a photograph. The part that hit my hot button was, it turns out, just a small piece Piano added to the top of am industrial building. The addition is striking and fine, but the rest of the factory building remains...a factory building. Thanks for helping me find my way into the web site. I hope his buildings are more user friendly than his web site. 🙂 Now the good news is that there are tons of pictures at this web site I can delve into and study. So: thanks twice!
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