Periplus is the Latin version of an ancient Greek word, περίπλους, literally meaning “a sailing-around.” For the Romans, the word came to denote a document specifying the distances between ports and coastal landmarks. In Atlantis, A Journey in Search of Beauty, Carlo and Renzo Piano, father and son, undertake an eight-month periplus, sailing around the world on the Italian oceanographic research ship Admiral Magnaghi. The trip comprises a global victory lap for Renzo, who was born in Genoa in 1937 and has designed and overseen the construction of iconic buildings such as Paris’ Pompidou Center, the Kansai International Airport in Osaka, London’s Shard, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Times Building in Manhattan, Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, and the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Noumea, New Caledonia. The voyage revisits many of his famous structures.
They depart from Genoa, sail around the Cape of Good Hope (the Suez Canal was closed), and arrive at Osaka Bay where the Kansai Airport was constructed on “an island that didn’t exist. They made it out of nothing by cutting the summits of three or four hills to procure 200 million cubic meters of gravel and rock.” At each location, Carlo Piano, who is a journalist, presents his father’s recollections and anecdotes. And in each building, Renzo finds something not quite to his liking. “Atlantis” becomes a trope for elusive perfection – but also, Carlo insists that Renzo believes that “the idea [of Atlantis] was not preposterous.”
Travelogue, natural history, mariner’s meditation, and architecture drama, Atlantis is animated by Renzo’s restless mind and lively recollections. But it is Carlo who weaves all sorts of relevant bits into the tale. For instance, he tells us that the modern Greek word anoxis means “spring” – but originally, the word “meant the moment a ship sails into the open sea, as well as the moment when your mind grasps an idea for the first time.” Atlantis itself is Carlo’s attempt to grasp the dynamics of his father’s creativity, a force that has managed to envision work, performance, institutional and living spaces in so many different environments and cultures. The voyage trope provides an armature on which not only to erect a vision of his father, but to consider the vastness of what is manifest and hidden.
Atlantis is not a personal disclosure-laden memoir. The narrative barely skims the surface of the relationship between father and son; at one point the father says, “I’m definitely not telling you about the mistakes I’ve made in my life.” But it is the implied gap between them that necessitates the trip and the tale. They do talk together at length and with mutual trust – but there is something larger than both of them to pursue. Carlo refers to his father variously, and always with respect, as The Constructor, The Surveyor, The Measurer, and The Explorer. Sometimes Renzo is irritable but “with a little patience you can interrogate him.”
From Japan, the ship crosses the Pacific to San Francisco to visit the museum of the California Academy of Sciences which had been damaged during the 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 earthquake. Renzo’s firm won the competition. He recalls, “It struck me as appropriate that the seat of a natural sciences institute should become a symbol of the environmental crisis … I was fascinated by the idea of working that way, using nature while surrounded by nature. It meant respecting fauna and flora, correctly arranging the buildings and plants, taking advantage of the light and wind.” But there is always a struggle to grasp the solution:
“To truly create something, an architect must accept the contradictions of his profession: discipline and freedom, nature and technology, memory and invention. … Untangling these knows can be complicated. Because the culture of the past threatens to bury you under an avalanche of memories, especially if you were born in Italy. The grand tradition is a paralyzing force. Borges put it better than I can when he said that creative work is suspended between memory and oblivion.”
They cruise through the Panama Canal, and then on to Manhattan. As the planning for each building is recounted, we come to appreciate the citation for Renzo’s 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize which reads, “Renzo Piano’s architecture reflects that rare melding of art, architecture, and engineering in a truly remarkable synthesis, making his intellectual curiosity and problem-solving techniques as broad and far ranging as those earlier masters of his native land, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo … Equally at ease with historical antecedents, as well as the latest technology, he is also intensely concerned with issues of habitability and sustainable architecture.”
About creativity, the father says, “When it first materializes, an idea is a ghost. It doesn’t come into focus. In fact you often regard it with suspicion. Then it returns and you muster the courage to give it a form – spoken, written or drawn. You make a sketch – quickly and roughly – so that it doesn’t become a trap.” The buildings are erected, the awards given – but the son begins to sketch his own understanding: “Each of us has lost something. Someone we loved, a great opportunity, innocence, ourselves. But above all we have lost perfection.” The father responds, “Cavafy warns: ‘Guard, O my soul, against pomp and glory. And if you cannot curb your ambitions, at least pursue them hesitantly, cautiously.’”
[Published by Europa Editions on November 3, 2020, $24.00 hardcover]