Renzo Piano at The Royal Academy

I recently had a day in London wandering around the Royal Academy and the British Museum. A great way to spend a day!

A casting pattern from the Pompidou Centre
The highlight of the Royal Academy was the exhibition of work by Italian architect Renzo Piano. His most famous buildings are probably the Shard in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where the infrastructure is bought to the fore and the walls tucked out of sight. You'll probably recognise a couple of these buildings, but I was amazed to see this:

I remember this temporary exhibition space set up in the grounds of the Natural History Museum and visiting the exhibition about the future of computing that was inside. I don't remember the exhibition but I do remember the building - it was supposed to be the future of such temporary structures. It wasn't of course, but it was an early piece of work by Piano and already showed his unusual approach to materials and joints.

Then there's the derelict spaceships of the Jean-Marie Tjibou Cutural Centre in New Caledonia:

Utterly beautiful and there's a row of them on an island out in the Pacific. The structures are designed to blend in with the surrounding area and set out in a 'village' arrangement reflecting the local Kanak culture. If this place hasn't been in a sci-fi film it'll only be because of the expense of getting a crew out there.

The drawings and models are beautiful. This is Osaka's Kansai airport:

Here's a cross-sectional view of Sala Santa Cecilia auditorium in Rome:
And now the drawn version:

Then there's Piano Island - a scale model of all his work:

Finally, this: an emergency children's surgery near Lake Victoria in Uganda. The plans aren't particularly interesting, but the materials are. The roofs are photo-voltaic cells sitting on walls made of compressed earth. This is a standard technique in the region and the raw material is right on site, saving in construction costs. This display showed the earth colours available at the site, alongside a full-size brick: