The Last Agorà

21 From the top of the hill in Vesima, near Genoa, where at the end of the 1980s Renzo Piano decided to build the Italian offices of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop – RPBW, the view of the sea is majestic. Walking through his studio, it’s as if you were suspended between land and sky. The wide glass walls tie in the worktables with the surrounding vegetation, which tries to worm its way in from every direction. These are Renzo Piano’s favourite “materials”: light, seawater, lightweight structures and openings to natural light from the sky. These are also the building blocks of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Indeed, discussing the monumental Athens building with Renzo Piano whilst he sat at the desk of his studio in Punta Nave sets off a strange short-circuit. It’s as if the thousands of kilometres separating Genoa from Athens were cancelled out by the extreme coherence of the architectural choices. Lorenzo Ciccarelli: The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cul- tural Center touches on a topic very dear to you: how good archi- tecture, and exchange with an educated and sensible client, can stimulate the regeneration of abandoned urban areas. How did you reconcile this objective with the rich and complex functional programme, that included an opera house and a national library? Renzo Piano: In many ways, the Athens project is similar to the AuditoriumParco della Musica in Rome. Naturally, the functions and the scale are different, but the urban situation we were faced with was similar. Both areaswere not quite on the outskirts, but on themargins of the consolidated urban center, and, for different reasons, lay abandoned. Even before we thought about land use, in Athens we thought about a project of urban expansion by implosion, pursuing a healthy idea of urban growth that is concerned with filling empty spaces. The Kallithea area presented very favourable conditions: it has good transport links to the center of Athens and it opens onto the Faliro bay, the city’s first port. In agreement with Andreas Dracopoulos, Co-PresidentandDirectoroftheStavros Niarchos Foundation, one of the requirements that emerged from the very beginning was to reconnect this large abandoned areawith the living urban fabric through the creation of a large public park. LC: Yet it was not an initial requirement that the park should take on this predominant role in the overall economy of the project. RP: The programme very clearly envisaged an opera house and a national library, both of con- siderable size, and a park linking them together. But we quickly realised that positioning both the theatre and the library in two autonomous build- ings, would end up almost completely saturating the site, relegating the park to a secondary role. What is more, during the first surveys, we observed that the site’s perceptive and physical connection with the sea had been completely lost. The baywas less than a hundred metres away, and yet it was invisible from the project site. All of the pieces of the puzzle even- tually came together as we imagined this big green artificial hill, belowwhich we would place the theatre and library buildings, and from above which the view of the sea and of the Acropolis would be restored. Athens is a city with very few green spaces, so we wanted to dedicate the almost entirety of the site to a big urban park for the people of the Kallithea neigh- bourhood and, naturally, of the whole of Athens. LC: Ever since the plateau Beaubourg of the Centre Pom- pidou, public space has been a fundamental element in your projects. Walking around the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cul- tural Center, it is obvious that that concept is behind many of its different elements: from the park, to the Agora, from the en- trances to the library and opera house, which function like cov- ered squares, to the Lighthouse at the top of the artificial hill. RP: Public space, squares and urban walking are the great inventions of European cities. The Greeks were the first to put in place spaces especially dedicated to civic lifewith the stoá and the agorá . In the SNFCCwe wanted to celebrate the public role of architecture. We put particular care into designing the Agora. Nestled between the park and the Canal, we wanted to make sure it wasn’t too small or too big. We didn’t want it to be too small to host events nor so big that it would feel chaotic. Eventually, I think, we managed to create an “intimate” space: an open-air room where people can meet and talk, access both the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Opera, and take the lift to the Lighthouse at the top of the hill. LC: The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center looks like an enormous vessel anchored on the shore, stretching out towards the bay and the horizon. How much did the evocative poweroftheseaandtheflowingwaterguideyourdesignchoices? RP: The presence of the sea is one of the fun- damental elements of the project, and, as I’ve mentioned, it led us to create this green hill. By digging the artificial Canal we wanted to bring the water fromthe bay into the site, flanking the theatre

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