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] Copyright © 2019 by Carlo Piano and Renzo Piano First publication 2020 by Europa Editions Translation by Will Schutt Original title: Atlantide.Viaggio alla ricerca della bellezza Translation copyright © 2020 by Europa Editions All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. 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 travel- ing away from the world I know at nine knots an hour. I won- der 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 meas- ure, which he regularly uncoils. He also attempts to guess dis- tances and weights, a kind of personal challenge. EE_PIANO ATLANTIS NEW DEF_ABATE The Homecoming Party.qxd 02/09/20 09:59 Pagina 14 1 4 - C A R L O & R E N Z O P I A N O 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 momen- tum, 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 A T L A N T I S - 1 5 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 1 6 - C A R L O & R E N Z O P I A N O 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.