<\/p>\n
At school, however, Piano was \u201ca dunce\u201d. \u201cMrs Piano, your son is not normal. I\u2019m sorry to say it, but it\u2019s my duty,\u201d one of his teachers once told his mother. That child would go on to become the architect behind the Centre Pompidou, the New York Times Building and The Shard, before returning to his native Genoa with the redevelopment of the Porto Antico and, in 2020, the San Giorgio Bridge. But in his telling, it all began much earlier, on his family\u2019s small building sites.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father would sit me down on a pile of sand and I would stay there. I watched this extraordinary miracle of a column rising up,\u201d Piano recalls. This is where the biographical story turns into a reflection on architecture. \u201cI have been building all my life, everywhere,\u201d he says. Yet the sense of wonder seems to be exactly the same as it was then: \u201cThe day before, it\u2019s just sand, it\u2019s nothing, and the next day there\u2019s something standing upright. Building is this: a miracle.\u201d<\/p>\n
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