Witold Rybczynski in Slate:
Thirty years ago, Piano and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Center, which heralded high-tech architecture and culminated a decade later in Norman Foster’s Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. Since then, Foster has moved away from high tech, as evidenced in his sleek Hearst Building, just up Eighth Avenue from the Times. So has Piano, whose addition to the Morgan Library in New York typifies his current low-key approach. However, in the New York Times Building (designed in association with FXFowle) Piano returns to his Pompidou roots; not exposed pipes and ducts—those were always impractical—but dramatic structural details that say, “This is how I am made.”
Read the photo-essay here.
