ATLANTIS NEW DEF ABATE the Homecoming Party.Qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 3

EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 3

A T L A N T I S EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 4 EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 5

Carlo & Renzo Piano

ATLANTIS A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF BEAUTY

Translated from the Italian by Will Schutt EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 6

Europa Editions 214 West 29th Street New York, N.Y. 10001 www.europaeditions.com [email protected]

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available ISBN 978-1-60945-623-8

Piano, Carlo & Renzo Atlantis

Book design by Emanuele Ragnisco www.mekkanografici.com

Cover image: © Renzo Piano, Design Emanuele Ragnisco

Prepress by Grafica Punto Print – Rome

Printed in USA. EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 7

C O N T E N T S

1. MACAIA - 13

2. A LETTER FROM ADMIRAL TEMPTATION - 20

3. REFLECTIONS BY THE PORT - 25

4. THE ISLAND THAT WASN’T - 39

5. RETRACING CAPTAIN COOK’S ROUTE - 59

6. THE SHIP OF SCIENTISTS - 78

7. THE PETRIFIED FOREST - 97

8. THE LIBRARY IN THE STONE - 113

9. THE PRAIRIES OF THE WHITNEY - 123

10. DESPERATELY SEEKING RENZO - 138

11. THE CITY OF THE FUTURE - 147 EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 8

12. THE SHARD ON THE THAMES - 154

13. SWAMP THING - 168

14. THE RETURN OF THE BLUE ANGEL - 192

15. MARE NOSTRUM - 204

16. CITY OF MUSIC - 216

17. STONE SICKNESS - 225

18. GINO’S WAR - 233

19. THE FIRST TIME - 243

20. EUREKA - 254

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - 269

ABOUT THE AUTHORS - 271 EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 9

To all those looking for Atlantis EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 10 EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 11

A T L A N T I S EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 12

Text Carlo Piano in Simoncini Garamond Text Renzo Piano in Helvetica EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 13

1. MACAIA

long sea. So long and lazy it darkens your thoughts and makes your stomach churn, while low-lying A clouds dissolve in water. Up seems down. The few drafts of air are hot and full of moisture. Back home we’d say the sirocco was blowing; I don’t know what they say around here. I do know that in Croatia they call this wind jugo and in Libya ghibli. Often yellow with the sands of Africa, it scatters the dust of the desert far and wide. Everything around us is still, except for the long waves. Our latitude is 7°18’36” South, our longitude 72°24’16” East. We’re in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the Chagos Islands, which I had never heard of before. For military reasons, we cannot land. So secret are the army bases that fifty years ago all of the inhabitants were deported to Mauritius, never to return. They still protest. I wonder by what twist of fate I’ve boarded this ship traveling away from the world I know at nine knots an hour. I wonder what my father is doing here, looking from the upper deck at the murky line between the sky and the sea, a line swallowed up by the surreal haze of macaia. He rests his elbows on the railing and looks out at the ocean, the one view available. He is measuring the length of the waves with his eyes. Measure, measure, measure—he’s obsessed. In his tattered right pocket, he keeps a yellow roll-up tape measure, which he regularly uncoils. He also attempts to guess distances and weights, a kind of personal challenge. EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 14

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In my opinion these waves have a period of one hundred meters and are three meters high. The long waves come from far away, from all the waters further east: the Andaman Sea, Pulau Nias, Sumatra, Java, the Sunda Strait. A wave is pure energy, rising from one point and propagating through space and time. In reality, it is pure momentum. It carries nothing on its back. I like measuring these long waves. To measure is to gesture towards knowledge, to attempt to understand. My friends call me the “Surveyor,” but I don’t just survey the land. I also measure the many angles and points of the sea, too. I measure everything. Things and distances. The extraordinary engineer Peter Rice and I used to bet on the dimensions of things all the time: the diameter of a table, the speed of a train, the depth of a lake. Whoever guessed closest won. One thing about getting into the habit of making measure- ments in your head is that you end up imagining not only what you see but the invisible forces at work: torsion, inertia, and the effects of the wind, heat, cold, and earthquakes. Fortunately, hidden in the hull of this 170-metric-ton ship is a gyroscope, which makes the ship more stable. Keeps it from rolling. Do you know how a gyroscope works? It’s a rotational device that, owing to the law of conservation of angular momentum, tends to maintain its axis of rotation in a fixed direction . . .

I have a vague idea about what a gyroscope is, but the waves are a total mystery. Researchers say some waves roam the ocean for more than a century before crashing into a cliff or splashing against a pier covered with mollusks. Could that be true? If so, then no one, not even my father, can say for certain where these waves come from. If they are a century old, they could be the same that swallowed, say, the ocean liner Principessa Mafalda off the coast of Brazil. Or carried messages in bottles at the turn of the twentieth century. There are all kinds of waves: transverse EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 15

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waves, square waves, breaking waves, barrel or cyclic waves. They can be spectacular and thunderous or insignificant and deceptively harmless. In this sliver of the Indian Ocean, the waves are especially long and unpleasant. My father can’t stand them. I can barely stand them. Macaia changes people’s per- sonalities, darkens even the most cheerful among us. There is another mystery that troubles me: what color is the sea? When we’re young we’re convinced it’s blue or azure. Nonsense. It’s daubed with turquoise, indigo, gray, green, emerald, and pure see-through. When it’s overcast it’s gun- metal, in the dark it’s black, at sunrise and sunset it appears flecked with gold. Sometimes there are whitecaps. Winds affect the color: the sirocco turns it silver, the tramontane glass. For Homer, it became the color of wine at dusk, but I’m not so sure I trust him. They say he was blind. The truth is the color of the sea is undefinable. No one knows what color it is. Every wave has its own, different light. My father can measure them all he wants, but in my opinion waves will always elude mathematical models. On days like today, when there is macaia, the sounds of the ocean are muffled. Detecting them is a struggle. The caws of seagulls fade and the winds become at most a murmur. All you hear is the splash of water against the hull and the thrum of the 1500-horsepower diesel engines. Macaia is a motionless and metaphysical haze, inside and out, a weird weather condition that often occurs off the coast of Genoa. The sirocco blankets the sky with clouds, creating a dreamlike atmosphere. Time stops, movements dwindle, the mood grows melancholic. Technically known as advection fog, macaia forms when moist air passes over cold ground, but for those who live in the Mediterranean, macaia is a fog that descends and makes your heart ache. Some say the name macaia derives from the Greek word malakia: a languor that afflicts body and soul. Others trace it EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 16

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back to Arabic and others still to the Latin word malacia, which means, among other things, “apathy.” Greek, Italian, Genoese, Arabic, Venetian—in the great lake of the Mediterranean, words, like cultures, mix, overlap, trade places. One language isn’t enough to describe all the wonders of the sea. There must be something in the chemical makeup of salt that chases off happy thoughts. Some people claim that the sea is the dwelling place of what we have lost, what we had wished for, our broken dreams, grief, and spilt tears.

The Measurer

Sailing is slowness and silence. Aboard a boat you lower your voice and look up at the sky. When he was still a kid, my father built a sailboat by hand in his garage in Pegli. He was sure he had correctly measured the garage door, but in order to get the boat out he had to demolish the wall. According to family lore, my grandpa became livid. Maybe that triggered my father’s mania for measurement. Sailing changes the rhythm of life as it is lived on firm ground. The way you walk, the way you think, the way you talk. The terminology is bizarre: “the stern,” “the bow,” “downwind,” “upwind,” “keel over,” “drift leeward.” You have to be more cautious, something you tend to forget when you first board. As soon as my father boards a ship he writes TAKE CARE NOT TO GET HURT in green marker on a Post-it, which he posts in plain view. If you don’t slow down, a broken foot is the least you can expect. You can even fall down a hatch. I once fell a few meters and landed in the bathroom, but I was a kid at the time, with flexible bones. On a ship there is quiet, a sense of respite, a state of suspension. The experience is as psychological as it is physical, since you’re buoyant, lulled by gentle movements. And not so gentle. EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 17

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* Macaia, this tedious roll while everything around you is at a standstill, makes you nauseated. Any chance of a fresh, northerly breeze? A good close-hauled heel, sitting leeward to run your hand over the water? For me, traveling by boat is enchanting. You experience slowness, silence, suspension. You fly and float, but you never touch the ground.

The sea makes us question many things, our sense of the horizon most of all, which is shattered by the incline, especially in rough water. However solid, the deck of a ship is not the same as dry land. Your feet acquire more importance, because you rely on them to keep your balance. Some believe that, on a buoyant surface, our feet are elevated to the status of a sense organ, on par with our hands, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. Your feet can’t get distracted and can’t relax. When there’s dead calm, everything is easier; the deck is almost level. But today there isn’t dead calm, there’s macaia.

Sandcastles

My father used to take us sailing every summer: me, my mother Magda, my brother Matteo, and my youngest sister Lia. Lia was very young at the time. We would make a night crossing to Corsica, which remained under Genoese control until the Treaty of Versailles. It was as if we never left territorial waters. At dawn in the cockpit we watched the silhouette of Cap Corse emerge, the bare rugged peaks of the sierras. The wind never lets up in those parts, and Genoese watchtowers, built to fend off Saracen pirates, still stand. As we rounded the cape, the water thundered against the prow. I think it was the EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 18

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vacation’s way of welcoming us. I enjoyed diving with my spear- gun to hunt for octopuses off the reefs. Underwater, through my mask, even a musky octopus loomed large, like a creature from the deep. I never succeeded in catching one, which may be why I enjoyed it so much. Usually we slept in the roadstead and avoided the ports, except to restock the pantry. A necessary operation, given how few fish we caught. The stability of the earth was a mirage. “A boat is made to be on water,” my father repeated, ad nauseam. A statement so obvious it was impossible to deny. With me came the Architect, Matteo, and Lia. On those rare occasions that we got to go to the beach, we would build sandcastles. My father would tell us that the first thing to bear in mind was that sandcastles serve no purpose. Building sandcastles is not a war game. It’s a game with the waves, an end in itself. We would look for the right spot in the sand and watch the surf on the shoreline break into white foam and retreat. We would watch for a solid quarter hour.

First thing you do is stand on the shoreline, at the edge of the beach, and observe the rise and fall of the surf. The relationship between the sandcastle and the sea is more important than it appears. Study the waves closely, one by one, then decide where to build the castle. But be careful: too close and the water will immediately destroy it, too far and the castle won’t compete with the waves. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually simple and intuitive. Then dig a shallow moat with your hands, being mindful to dig where the sand is damp; make a pile; and sculpt it until you’ve formed the base of the castle. Ideally, the mound should sit at a forty-five degree slope. The moat need be no deeper than thirty centimeters and no wider than forty-five centimeters, whereas the castle should be sixty centimeters tall. EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 19

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Now as then, all these angles, centimeters, and fluid dynam- ics confuse me. You’re never too old to build sandcastles: it can be fun for adults, since sandcastles help us think like children. But my father isn’t done with his lesson.

Afterward dig an opening in the moat to let the water in. The moment the waves first enter and flood the moat is magical. If the castle is in a good spot, you can watch the water run its course. Then, to store the image in your memory, close your eyes as the water arrives, quickly, before it slips away. You have to freeze the moment; your retina snaps a photograph. Then top the castle with a flag, or whatever is lying around on the beach, so that it will be visible to people walking by. Turn home and don’t look back.

Don’t turn around because the castle is bound to disappear, and to see it crumble would only bring disappointment. You’re better off preserving the memory.