Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Renzo Piano
Italian; 20th-century, 21st-century
Des Moines, IA: 1459 Grand Avenue
72%
Krause Gateway Center. 2018
Piano's palette and materials deserve critique. There's so much slick industrial stuff here, so many greys and whites and so much transparency, and it's all so nondescript to the point of seeming artistically noncommittal. This combines with the overall structure of the building — it layers whole windowed storeys with those slim horizontal floors to produce a weightless, almost levitated effect — and results in a sort of averred anonymity, which is Piano's trademark. It's the anonymity — the invisible-handed driftlessness, yet simultaneous surety — of corporate architecture since postmodernism, of which style (or non-style) Piano is the master. From a purely optical standpoint, he's not to be condemned: the total absence of surface in a building like this serves as a sort of neutral ground for his dalliances with form, which, as in the case of an external stairway that zags to amplify the off-beat rhythms of the building's drunken climb, can be significant. But so much heart is sacrificed to achieve this neutrality that it can leave one cold to consider the structures that express themselves against it. (TFS, 2025)