title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: In April 2013 the Government estimated the total cost of the rebuild would be as much as $40 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $30 billion. Some economists have estimated it will take the New Zealand economy 50 to 100 years to completely recover. The earthquake was the most damaging in a year-long earthquake swarm affecting the Christchurch area. It was followed by a large aftershock on 13 June (which caused considerable additional damage) and a series of large shocks on 23 December 2011.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Finance Minister Bill English advised that the effects of the 2011 quake were likely to be more costly than the September 2010 quake. His advice was that the 2011 earthquake was a "new event" and that EQC's reinsurance cover was already in place after the previous 2010 event. New Zealand's Earthquake Commission (EQC), a government organisation, levies policyholders to cover a major part of the earthquake risk. The EQC further limits its own risk by taking out cover with a number of large reinsurance companies, for example Munich Re.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: The EQC pays out the first NZ$1.5 billion in claims, and the reinsurance companies are liable for all amounts between NZ$1.5 billion and NZ$4 billion. The EQC again covers all amounts above NZ$4 billion. EQC chief executive Ian Simpson said that the $4 billion cap for each earthquake is unlikely to be exceeded by the costs of residential building and land repairs, so $3 billion would be left in the EQC's Natural Disaster Fund after payouts.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Claims from the 2010 shock were estimated at NZ$2.75–3.5 billion. Prior to the 2010 quake, the EQC had a fund of NZ$5.93 billion according to the EQC 2010 Annual Report, with NZ$4.43 billion left prior to the 2011 quake, after taking off the NZ$1.5 billion cost.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: EQC cover for domestic premises entitles the holder to up to NZ$100,000 plus tax (GST) for each dwelling, with any further amount above that being paid by the policyholder's insurance company. For personal effects, EQC pays out the first NZ$20,000 plus tax. It also covers land damage within 8 metres of a home; this coverage is uncapped.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Commercial properties are not insured by the EQC, but by private insurance companies. These insurers underwrite their commercial losses to reinsurers, who will again bear the brunt of these claims. JPMorgan Chase & Co say the total overall losses related to this earthquake may be US$12 billion. That would make it the third most costly earthquake event in history, after the 2011 Japan and 1994 California earthquakes.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee echoed that fewer claims were expected through the EQC than for 2010. In the 2010 earthquake, 180,000 claims were processed as opposed to the expected 130,000 claims for the 2011 aftershock. The total number of claims for the two events was expected to be 250,000, as Brownlee explained that many of the claims were "overlapping".


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: The Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) announced it would be the largest single event they had paid out for, with an estimated 7,500 injury claims costing over $200 million.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: On 2 March 2011, John Key said he expected an interest rate cut to deal with the earthquake. The reaction to the statement sent the New Zealand dollar down.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: In January 2013 Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee said repairs to damaged homes to date had totalled more than $1 billion.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: A KPMG survey in March 2013 suggested as much as $1.5 billion could be sucked from the rebuild in fraud.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: In March 2013 a researcher at the University of Canterbury said after the quake, residents – particularly women – turned to comfort food and began eating unhealthily.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: The Christchurch earthquake of 2011 had widespread mental health effects on the population. Research following the Christchurch earthquakes has shown that increasing exposure to the damage and trauma of a natural disaster is correlated with an increase in depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Those with the most exposure suffer the most from mental health deficits, compared with those that are relatively unaffected. Increases in trauma exposure are related to increased dependence on alcohol and nicotine, as well as prescribed psychiatric medication. This information is important to consider when reacting to future earthquakes and other natural disasters. There is evidence that suggests that the mental health effects of natural disasters can be debilitating and detrimental to the community affected.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Evidence from research on the Christchurch earthquakes reveals that increased trauma exposure is not exclusively correlated with negative outcomes. Those with relatively high exposure to earthquake damage show an increase in positive effects, including an increase in personal strength, growth in social relationships, the bringing of families closer, and realizing what's important in life. It's thought that natural disasters, such as earthquakes, are able to induce these positive effects because they affect an entire community, in comparison to an event that targets only an individual. The damage on a community can lead members to engage in pro-social behaviors which are driven by empathy and desire to support others who have endured a similar traumatizing experience. Positive effects, such as a greater sense of community connection, can aide in helping the community heal as a whole. Implemented programs can use this knowledge to help survivors focus on the positive effects, possibly working with families to help them get through the disaster with the people they feel closest with.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Predictors of poor mental health after a trauma, such as mental health status prior to a trauma and individual characteristics, can help determine those who will be more vulnerable to developing mental health problems. Those that exhibit lower mental health prior to an earthquake will be more likely to experience negative life changes than positive life changes with regard to personal strength. Depressive symptoms before a disaster can predict higher chances of developing PTSD following a trauma. People who exhibit lower mental health prior to the trauma don't adapt as well following trauma, and show higher levels of PTSD. Personality traits, such as neuroticism and low self-control are associated with a lower sense of normality following an earthquake, however optimism is predictive of lower and less severe PTSD symptoms.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Studying earthquakes has shown to be a difficult task when considering all the limitations created by natural disasters. Clinical interviews are difficult because of the widespread damage to infrastructure and roads, which leads to reliance on self-report. Self-report can introduce bias to results, leading to skewed data. Researchers are unable to reliably compare an individual's mental health status to their health status previous to the trauma because they must rely on retrospective self-report. Retrospective self-report is affected greatly by the individual's current state of distress. The displacement of large numbers of citizens following a trauma poses as a problem for researchers of natural disasters. It is predicted that the people who are displaced experience the worst of the damage, and therefore the reported levels of PTSD and depression are often lower than they would have been had the displaced citizens been available to collect data from. Because large number of citizens are being displaced, it is difficult to find a representative sample population. For example, after the Christchurch earthquakes, studies reported that older educated females of European New Zealand descent were over represented in their sample population, which isn't accurate of the Christchurch population as a whole.


title: 2011 Christchurch earthquake

text: Researching the mental health effects of earthquakes and other disasters is important so communities can heal properly after experiencing a traumatic event. This is a difficult topic to research because fixing the physical damage from a disaster is usually the first step a city takes towards recovery. Each individual can react differently to traumatic events, and more research needs to be done to learn how to predict vulnerability and access the effects to find solutions that work best. Because it has been found that different demographics are affected differently, this also needs to be taken into account when finding solutions to aid recovery. Different demographics may benefit from different types of mental counseling to help them recover from trauma. It will be important to have information on a wide variety of demographic groups because the same mental health treatment will not help all of those affected by a trauma.


title: Attempted assassination of Theodore Roosevelt

text: On October 14, 1912, former saloonkeeper John Flammang Schrank (1876–1943) attempted to assassinate former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt while he was campaigning for the presidency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Schrank's bullet lodged in Roosevelt's chest after penetrating Roosevelt's steel eyeglass case and passing through a thick (50 pages) single-folded copy of the speech titled "Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual", which he was carrying in his jacket. Schrank was immediately disarmed (by Czech immigrant Frank Bukovsky) and captured; he might have been lynched had Roosevelt not shouted for Schrank to remain unharmed. Roosevelt assured the crowd he was all right, then ordered police to take charge of Schrank and to make sure no violence was done to him. Roosevelt did not believe in police harming civilians.


text: As an experienced hunter and anatomist, Roosevelt correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung; he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."


text: Afterwards, probes and an x-ray showed that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle, but did not penetrate the pleura. As doctors concluded that it would be less dangerous to leave it in place than to attempt to remove it, Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life. Both President William Howard Taft and Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson suspended their own campaigning until Roosevelt recovered and resumed his. When asked if the shooting would affect his election campaign, he said to the reporter "I'm fit as a bull moose." The bull moose became a symbol of both Roosevelt and the Progressive Party; it often was referred to as simply the Bull Moose Party. He spent two weeks recuperating before returning to the campaign trail. He later wrote a friend about the bullet inside him, "I do not mind it any more than if it were in my waistcoat pocket."


text: The shooter, John Schrank, initially pleaded guilty to the charge of attempted murder, but the trial judge, unconvinced of Schrank's sanity, declined his plea and the case was brought to trial. Schrank was found not guilty by reason of insanity by the jury and was sentenced to indefinite institutionalization.


text: The 1912 presidential election campaign was characterized by a serious split in the Republican Party between the conservative wing under President William Howard Taft and the liberal/reform wing under ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. After a bitter confrontation at the Republican Convention, Taft won renomination. Roosevelt led a bolt of his followers, who held a convention and nominated him for president on the ticket of the Progressive Party, nicknamed the "Bull Moose Party". Taft and his supporters attacked Roosevelt for being power-hungry and seeking to break the tradition that U.S. Presidents only serve up to two terms in office.


text: According to documents found on Schrank after the attempted assassination, Schrank had written that the ghost of William McKinley came to him in a dream and told Schrank to avenge his death, pointing to a picture of Theodore Roosevelt. Ultimately, on October 14, 1912, while Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Schrank attempted to assassinate him.


text: Roosevelt was at the Gilpatrick Hotel, at a dinner provided by the hotel's owner, a supporter. The ex-President was scheduled to deliver a speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium. News had circulated that Roosevelt was at the hotel, and Schrank (who had been following Roosevelt from New Orleans to Milwaukee) went to the hotel. The ex-president had finished his meal and left the hotel to enter an open car. Roosevelt stood to acknowledge the cheering of the assembled crowd, and Schrank acted.


text: Schrank did shoot Roosevelt, but the bullet lodged in Roosevelt's chest only after hitting both his steel eyeglass case and a 50-page copy of his speech titled "", which he was carrying in his jacket pocket. As onlookers gasped and screamed, Elbert E. Martin, one of Roosevelt's secretaries and an ex-football player, was the first to react, leaping at Schrank, wrestling him to the ground and seizing his gun. A. O. Girard, a former Rough Rider and bodyguard of the ex-president, and several policemen were upon Schrank at the same moment. Roosevelt stumbled, but straightened himself, and again raised his hat, with a reassuring smile upon his face. His aide, Harry Cochems, asked Roosevelt if he was hit, and Roosevelt simply said assuredly, "He pinked me, Harry."


text: As Schrank was subdued and held up on his feet, the crowd went into a frenzy. Several of the closest men around Schrank began pummeling him, and others screamed "kill him!", and "hang him!". Roosevelt, seeing what was happening, shouted to the crowd, "Don't hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him." The crowd, hearing Roosevelt's voice, looked at Roosevelt, astonished to see him standing up and talking. A member asked, "Is he okay?"; Roosevelt, with a reassuring smile, waved his hat in the air and said, "I'm all right, I'm all right." In relief, the crowd erupted in cheers, enabling four policemen to gain their way into the crowd and hold Schrank. Roosevelt ordered, "Bring him to me." Schrank was led to Roosevelt, and the two men looked into each other's eyes. Putting his hands on Schrank's head so he could look at him, and to determine if he had seen him before, Roosevelt said to Schrank, "What did you do it for?" Getting no response, he said, "Oh, what's the use? Turn him over to the police." As police held Schrank, Roosevelt looked down at him, and said, "You poor creature." Roosevelt ordered, "Officers, take charge of him, and see that there is no violence done to him." Girard and another officer led Schrank away into the hotel as the crowd booed at him and applauded for Roosevelt, abiding by his wishes. Roosevelt gave another reassuring tip of the hat to the crowd before he took off in his car. Schrank was led into the kitchen where he was turned over to the local police.


text: Roosevelt, as an experienced hunter and anatomist, correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung, and he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his with blood seeping into his shirt. He spoke for 84 minutes before completing his speech and accepting medical attention. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."


text: Afterwards, probes and an x-ray showed that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle, but did not penetrate the pleura. Doctors concluded that it would be less dangerous to leave it in place than to attempt to remove it, and Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life. In later years, when asked about the bullet inside him, Roosevelt would say, "I do not mind it any more than if it were in my waistcoat pocket."


text: Both Taft and Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson suspended their own campaigning until Roosevelt recovered and resumed his. When asked if the shooting would affect his election campaign, he said to the reporter, "I'm fit as a bull moose", which inspired the party's emblem. Roosevelt made only two more speeches in the campaign. Although Roosevelt won more votes and electoral votes than Taft, Wilson bested both of them to win the presidency.


text: John Flammang Schrank (March 5, 1876 – September 15, 1943) was a Bavarian-born saloonkeeper from New York who attempted to assassinate former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt on October 14, 1912, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Schrank was born in Erding, Bavaria, on March 5, 1876. He emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 9. His parents died soon after, leaving Schrank to work for his uncle, a New York tavern owner and landlord. Upon their deaths, Schrank's aunt and uncle left him valuable properties, with the expectation that Schrank could live a quiet and peaceful life. Schrank was heartbroken, not just because he had lost his second set of parents, but also because his first and only girlfriend Emily Ziegler had died in the "General Slocum" disaster on New York's East River. Schrank sold the properties, and drifted around the East Coast for years. He became profoundly religious, and a fluent Bible scholar, whose debating skills were well known around his neighborhood's watering holes and public parks. He wrote spare and vivid poetry. He spent a great deal of time walking around city streets at night but caused no documented trouble.


text: Roosevelt, who had left office three and a half years earlier, was running for president as a member of the Progressive Party. During a Roosevelt campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Schrank, who had been stalking him for weeks, shot Roosevelt once in the chest with a .38-caliber Colt Police Positive Special revolver. The 50-page text of his campaign speech folded over twice in Roosevelt's breast pocket and a metal glasses case slowed the bullet, saving his life. Schrank was immediately disarmed, captured and might have been lynched had Roosevelt not shouted for Schrank to remain unharmed.


text: Soon after the assassination attempt, psychologists examined Schrank and reported that he had "insane delusions, grandiose in character," declaring him to be insane. At his trial, the would-be assassin claimed that William McKinley's ghost had visited him in a dream and told him to avenge his assassination by killing Roosevelt. Schrank was committed to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waupun, Wisconsin, in 1914. He remained there for 29 more years, until he died on September 15, 1943, of bronchial pneumonia. His body was donated to the medical school at Marquette University (now the Medical College of Wisconsin) for anatomical dissection.


text: While John F. Schrank was committed, he wrote a number of letters to the doctor he was consulting at the mental hospital, Adin Sherman. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington possesses twenty of them. The letters are dated between 1914 and 1918. The accession number in the Manuscripts Collection is 148.


text: The Milwaukee Public Library contains a collection of court exhibits and transcripts from Schrank's trial. It is Local History Manuscript Collection 43.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: Black Monday is an American historical dark comedy television series created by Jordan Cahan and David Caspe that premiered on January 20, 2019, on Showtime. The series stars Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells, Regina Hall, Casey Wilson, and Paul Scheer, and follows the employees of second-tier Wall Street trading firm the Jammer Group during the year leading up to "Black Monday", the day when international stock markets crashed in 1987. In April 2019, the series was renewed for a second season that premiered on March 15, 2020. In October 2020, the series was renewed for a third season, which premiered on May 23, 2021. In January 2022, the series was cancelled after three seasons.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: "Black Monday" is described as taking the audience "back to October 19, 1987—aka Black Monday, the worst stock market crash in Wall Street history. To this day, no one knows who caused it—until now. It's the story of how a group of outsiders took on the blue-blood, old-boys club of Wall Street and ended up crashing the world's largest financial system, a Lamborghini limousine, Don Henley's birthday party and the glass ceiling."


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: The first season follows Blair Pfaff, an aspiring white stockbroker on Wall Street. Through a series of farcical events, he ends up working for Maurice Monroe, a veteran stockbroker. Blair endures workplace hazing and fights to prove he's tough enough for the high-stakes environment. Simultaneously, he tries to preserve his strained engagement to spoiled heiress, Tiffany Georgina. Monroe plans to use Blair to execute an underhanded business deal that involves buying out Tiffany's family company, Georgina Jeans.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: Dawn Darcy, the only woman among her coworkers, is running out of patience when it comes to Monroe's unwillingness to recognize her value in the workplace. Her husband wants to have children, leading to a crossroads in their marriage. Keith, an employee who takes interest in bullying Blair, is a closeted homosexual who carries on an affair with a Broadway performer. Monroe, meanwhile, struggles with the internal turmoil of reaching the high standards he sets for himself, as well as living under a false identity.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: The resulting backdoor deals, personal conflicts, and the journey of a particular pin create an increasingly convoluted mess as Black Monday approaches.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: In 2013, Showtime began to develop the production, then titled "Ball Street", but the series never ended up moving beyond the developmental stage. In the fourth quarter of 2016, following the purchase of a pilot by David Caspe and Jordan Cahan, the project was put back into development with Caspe and Cahan in charge.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: On September 7, 2017, it was announced that Showtime had given the production a pilot order. The pilot script was written by Caspe and Cahan, both of whom were also expected to act as showrunners. The pilot was set to be directed by Canadian comedians Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who were also to serve as executive producers along with Caspe and Cahan. Production companies involved with the pilot included Sony Pictures Television.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: On June 14, 2018, it was announced that Showtime had given the production, now titled "Black Monday", a series order for a first season consisting of ten episodes. On October 19, 2018, it was reported that the series would premiere on January 20, 2019.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: On April 29, 2019, Showtime renewed the series for a second season, which premiered on March 15, 2020. On October 15, 2020, Showtime renewed the series for a third season, which premiered on May 23, 2021. On January 20, 2022, Paul Scheer revealed on his Twitch stream, FriendZone with his co-host, Rob Huebel that the series was not renewed.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: Alongside the pilot order announcement, it was confirmed that Don Cheadle and Andrew Rannells had been cast in the series' lead roles. On February 12, 2018, it was announced that Regina Hall, Paul Scheer, Kurt Braunohler, and Eugene Cordero had joined the pilot's cast. Additionally, it was reported that Casey Wilson would guest star in the pilot with the potential to become a recurring cast member if the pilot was picked up to series.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: Alongside the series order announcement, it was confirmed that Yassir Lester and Michael James Scott had joined the cast and that Ken Marino would make a guest appearance. On September 20, 2018, it was announced that Kadeem Hardison had been cast in a recurring role. On October 16, 2018, it was reported that Bruce Dern, Melissa Rauch, Horatio Sanz, Julie Hagerty, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Tim Russ and Jason Michael Snow would appear in guest starring roles.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: Principal photography for the pilot was expected to begin in mid-February 2018 in Los Angeles, California. Filming for the rest of season one began on September 28, 2018, at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: In September 2018, the first teaser trailer for the series was released, followed in October by the official trailer. In December 2018, a second teaser trailer was released. On December 28, 2018, the first episode of the series was released early through Facebook, YouTube, and Showtime's streaming applications. The program's marketing, rather than using the current "SHO" disc logo utilized by Showtime, used the wordmark version used from 1984 to 1997 to promote the series to its time period.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: On January 14, 2019, the series held its world premiere at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Those in attendance included David Caspe, Jordan Cahan, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, Jon Hamm, Horatio Sanz, Paul Scheer, Yassir Lester, Ken Marino, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Elia Cantu, Kadeem Hardison, Kurt Braunohler, Jennifer Zaborowski, Xosha Roquemore, David Krumholtz, David Nevins, and Amy Israel.


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: The series was met with a mixed response from critics upon its premiere, but Cheadle's performance was widely praised. the series' first season holds a 56% approval rating with an average rating of 6.08 out of 10 based on 45 reviews on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. The website's critical consensus reads, ""Black Monday" zips with irrepressible style and a seductively stacked cast of charismatics starsbut this Wall Street odyssey is too preoccupied with flash to ferment its needed substance." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the series a score of 57 out of 100 based on 29 critics' reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Black Monday (TV series)

text: The second season was met with a mixed to positive response from critics. As of August 2020, the series' second season holds a 83% approval rating with an average rating of 5 out of 10 based on 6 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.


title: Jennifer Hale filmography

text: Jennifer Hale is a Canadian-American voice actress best known for her work in video game series including "Baldur's Gate", "Mass Effect", "Metal Gear Solid", "Spider-Man", "BioShock Infinite", and "". In 2013, she was recognized by Guinness World Records as "the most prolific video game voice actor (female)".


title: Renzo Piano

text: Renzo Piano (; born 14 September 1937) is an Italian architect. His notable buildings include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (with Richard Rogers, 1977), The Shard in London (2012), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (2015), İstanbul Modern in Istanbul (2022) and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens (2016). He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998.


title: Renzo Piano

text: Piano was born and raised in Genoa, Italy, into a family of builders. His grandfather had created a masonry enterprise, which had been expanded by his father, Carlo Piano, and his father's three brothers, into the firm Fratelli Piano. The firm prospered after World War II, constructing houses and factories and selling construction materials. When his father retired, the enterprise was led by Renzo's older brother, Ermanno, who studied engineering at the University of Genoa. Renzo studied architecture at the University of Florence and Polytechnic University of Milan. He graduated in 1964 with a dissertation about modular coordination ("coordinazione modulare") supervised by Giuseppe Ciribini and began working with experimental lightweight structures and basic shelters.


title: Renzo Piano

text: Piano taught at the Polytechnic University from 1965 until 1968, and expanded his horizons and technical skills by working in two large international firms, for the modernist architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and for the Polish engineer Zygmunt Stanisław Makowski in London. He completed his first building, the IPE factory in Genoa, in 1968, with a roof of steel and reinforced polyester, and created a continuous membrane for the covering of a pavilion at the Milan Triennale in the same year. In 1970, he received his first international commission, for the Pavilion of Italian Industry for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. He collaborated with his brother Ermanno and the family firm, which manufactured the structure. It was lightweight and original composed of steel and reinforced polyester, and it appeared to be simultaneously artistic and industrial.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The 1970 Osaka structure was greatly admired by the British architect Richard Rogers, and in 1971 the two men decided to open their own firm, Piano and Rogers, where they worked together from 1971 to 1977. The first project of the firm was the administrative building of B&B Italia, an Italian furniture company, in Novedrate, Como, Italy. This design featured suspended container and an open bearing structure, with the conduits for heating and water on the exterior painted in bright colors (blue, red and yellow). These unusual features attracted considerable attention in the architectural world, and influenced the choice of the jurors who selected Piano and Rogers to design the Pompidou Center.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 1971 the thirty-four-year old Piano and Richard Rogers, thirty-eight, in collaboration with the Italian architect Gianfranco Franchini, competed with the major architectural firms in the United States and Europe, and were awarded the commission for the most prestigious project in Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the new French national museum of 20th century art to be located in Beaubourg. The award came a surprise, to the architectural world, since the two were little-known, and had no experience with museums or other major structures. "The New York Times" declared that their design "turned the architecture world upside down". More literally it turned architecture inside-out, since in the new museum, the apparent structural frame of the building and the heating and air conditioning ducts were on the exterior, painted in bright colors. The escalator, in a transparent tube, crossed the facade of the building at a diagonal. The building was an astonishing success, entirely transforming the character of a run-down commercial section near the Marais in Paris, and made Piano one of the best-known architects in the world.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The media dubbed the style of the building as "high-tech", but this was later disputed by Piano. "Beaubourg," he said, "was a joyous urban machine, a creature which might have come out of a Jules Verne novel, a sort of bizarre boat in dry dock... It is a double provocation; a challenge to academism, but also a parody of the imagery of technology of our time. To consider it as a high-tech object is a mistake."


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 1977 Piano ended his collaboration with Rogers and began a new collaboration with engineer Peter Rice, who had assisted in the design of the Pompidou Center. They established their offices in Genoa. One of their first projects was a plan for the rehabilitation of the old port of Otranto from an industrial site into a commercial and tourist attraction (1977). Their first major building was the Menil Collection, in art museum for the art collector Dominique de Menil. The chief requirements of the owner for this building was to make the maximum use of natural light in the interiors. Piano wrote, "Paradoxically, the Menil Collection, with its serenity, its calm, its discretion, is much more modern, scientifically speaking, than the Beaubourg." The Menil Collection building, with its simple gray and white cubic forms, is the stylistic opposite of the Pompidou Center. The technological innovations were not expressed on the facade, but in the high-tech but discreet systems of shutters and screens and air conditioning which allowed maximum illumination while protecting against the intense Texas heat and sunlight.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In the mid-1980s Piano and his firm took on a wide variety of projects, using the most advanced technology available, but, in contrast to the Pompidou Center, as discreetly as possible. His portable pavilion for IBM (1983–1986) was an example; designed with Peter Rice, it a lightweight portable tunnel for expositions. It composed of a series of pyramids of polycarbonate supported by a wooden frame, and could be transported in a truck. It was designed to integrate the scenery outside into displays in the interior. He designed a two major reconstruction projects in northern Italy; the reanimation of the old port of his native city, Genoa, and the conversion and modernization of the gigantic and historic Fiat factory in Turin, Italy. For the Fiat Lingotto factory, he preserved the enormous main structure, including its famous oval test track for automobiles on the roof, but added new structures, including a concert hall beneath the building, a heliport, and a glass domed conference center on the roof. He continued his modifications and additions over two decades; without destroying the historic core of the building. The most recent was a museum for the art collection of the Fiat head Giovanni Agnelli in an elegant glass and steel box perched on the roof, as if it were about to take off; it was nicknamed the "Flying bank vault".


title: Renzo Piano

text: Piano also carried out a large program for revitalization of the old port of Genoa to transform it from a rundown industrial area into a cultural center and tourist attraction. He prolonged streets to give access to the port, transformed old port buildings into cultural and commercial buildings, added a library, an aquarium and an auditorium, a botanical garden in glass dome and a giant multi-armed crane, modeled after the old cranes of the port, which hoists visitors high in the air for a view of the port.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In addition, he designed the new headquarters of his firm, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (1989–1991), on a series of stepped terraces hanging over the Mediterranean to the west of the city. The building is accessed by an eight-passenger funicular railway car which shuttles up and down the hillside.


title: Renzo Piano

text: "The Whale" Bercy 2 is a shopping mall with 70 stores and 36,000 m2 located in Paris Charenton, along the bankside of the river Seine and the "Périphérique" ring road.


title: Renzo Piano

text: Inaugurated on April 24, 1990, the building is only the third work of architect after the Centre Pompidou. The cyclopean wooden structure, covered with 27,000 satin stainless steel tiles and pierced with oculus to let an overhead light pass, is completely innovative. Its curvature which follows the turn of a ramp on the ring road evokes a large airship, hence the nicknames "The Zeppelin" or "The Whale".


title: Renzo Piano

text: In the mid-1980s Sitmar Cruises began a rigorous building schedule for the North American market. At the time one ship the Sitmar Fairmajesty was ordered for French shipyard Chantiers de l'Antlantique. The Italian government through Fincantieri would desire for the next Sitmar ships to be built in Italy. Piano was commissioned to design the ships. Piano designed the exterior of the ships to resemble a dolphin. The Crown Princess was delivered to Princess Cruises in 1990 and the Regal Princess followed a year later in 1991.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 1988 Piano and Rice won an international competition for a new airport to be constructed on an artificial island in the port of Osaka, Japan. The main terminal he designed was extremely long (), with a very low profile, so that the controllers in the control tower could always see the aircraft on the runways. The frequent earthquakes in the Japanese islands required special building techniques; the structure is mounted on hydraulic joints which adjust to movements of the earth. The long, curving roof is covered with 82,000 panels of stainless steel, which reflect the sunlight, and is supported by arches long, which give a feeling of openness.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Fondation Beyeler is a private art museum in Riehen, near Basel, Switzerland, built for the art collection of Ernst Beyeler. Although it opened in the same year as the Guggenheim Bilbao of Frank Gehry, in spirit it was exactly the opposite. It was designed, at the request of the founder, to inspire tranquility, with white walls, light-colored wooden floors, and natural light. The wall separating the museum from the neighboring road constructed of porphyry stone from Patagonia. also used in different parts of the Museum.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa, New Caledonia (1991–1998), is among the most unusual of Piano's works. A joint project between New Caledonia and the French government, it is designed to display the culture of the Kanak people. The project uses a combination of traditional and modern material; local wood, along with glass and aluminum. The complex is located on a narrow peninsula in a lagoon with prevailing winds. Piano designed a series of curved wooden screens, from high, to protect the exposition structures, then three "villages" of structures; one for welcome and exhibitions space; one for an auditorium and media center; and one for service functions. The curving wooden pavilions, inspired in form by the local architecture, have a double wooden skin to protect against the weather, but also let in the sunlight. While it is devoted to the local culture, some of the buildings, particularly the towering reception center, with curving walls and wooden spires, are strikingly post-modern in form.


title: Renzo Piano

text: His other projects begun in the 1990s included the New Metropolis Museum in Amsterdam, which later became the science museum and technology NEMO (1992–1997), placed on the edge of the harbor, and resembling the hull of an enormous ship; the Parco della Musica, a complex of music performance halls in Rome (1994–2002), Each was entirely different from the others, and in this period it was difficult to discern a specific element that or style defined his architecture, other than careful craftsmanship and attention to detail.


title: Renzo Piano

text: Potsdamer Platz is a historic triangle in the heart of Berlin Germany, which had been largely destroyed during World War II, and then divided by the Berlin Wall between East and West Berlin. When a major reconstruction was commenced in 1990, Piano was selected to design the new buildings on five of the fifteen sites of the project, with the requirement that the buildings have roofs of copper, and facades of clear glass and materials of a baked earth color. Other architects engaged in the enormous project included Rafael Moneo, Arata Isozaki, and his former partner, Richard Rogers. The centerpiece of Piano's part of the project was the Debis building, composed of four different buildings of different sizes but in the same style. Distinctive elements include an atrium high, and a 21-story tower whose east, south and west facades are covered with double walls of glass separated by , which reduced the need for air conditioning and heating. The complex also included an IMAX movie theater, restaurant and shops. The dome of the IMAX theater was visible from a distance and also from the street, through the clear glass of the facade. Piano wrote in "The Disobedience of the Architect" (2004) that he tried to match his architecture to the personality of a city. "The Berliners are accustomed to living outdoors, and to a certain form of conviviality." The new Potsdamer Platz was designed to capture the Berliner's "sense of gaiety, their sense of humor...Why should a city be demoralizing? The beautiful thing about a city is that it is a place of meetings and surprises."


title: Renzo Piano

text: Aurora Place in Sydney, Australia (1996–2009) is composed of two towers, an eighteen-story residential building next to a forty-one story office building with different facades but similar metal and glass sunscreens on the roofs. The lower tower was an early example of the luxury high-rise residential buildings by star architects in the center large cities which became very popular in the early 21st century. The office tower has a discreetly peculiar form; the east façade bulges out slightly from its base, reaching its maximum width at the top floors. The curved and twisted shape of east the façade echoes that of the Sydney Opera House on the harbor. The exterior glass curtain-wall extends beyond the main frame, creating an illusion that the wall is independent of the building. of its Glass shutters on the exterior can be opened for ventilation, and Piano designed an exterior skin combining glass and ceramics to regulate the intensity of the sunlight. The office building has interior winter gardens on each floor, and earth-colored ceramic tiles give a dash of color to the facade.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Auditorium Niccolo Paganini is a concert hall constructed inside a former sugar mill in the historic center of the city of Parma, Italy. The theater has 780 seats placed on a slope for maximum visibility of the stage. Piano retained the original exterior walls of the main building, but removed the transversal interior walls and replaced them with glass walls, so the entire interior is visible from the outside, and those inside can see the park outside the theater.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Maison Hermès in the Ginza commercial district of Tokyo is the flagship store in Japan of the French luxury brand. The building is ten stories high, with three floors underground, and includes space for expositions and for a small museum on the history of the firm. The building is highly geometrical; precisely high, with a facade composed of 13,000 pieces of glass each exactly . The panels of glass were made in Florence, Italy, and placed in supports made in Switzerland, for assembly in Japan. Each piece of the facade is designed to be able to move to resist earthquakes. When illuminated a night, the building is intended to resemble a "magic lantern".


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Parco della Musica is the complex of music venues located in the Rome neighborhood which hosted the 1960 Summer Olympics. The park has three theaters, the largest with 2800 seats; when completed it was the largest symphonic concert hall in Europe. Piano acknowledged that his inspiration for the interior plan was the vineyard style seating, placed around the orchestra, of the Berlin Philharmonic by Hans Sharon. The three brick concert halls covered with what New York Times critic Sam Lubell described as "weathered armadillo-like steel shells," which looked forbidding in photographs but in person were "lovely"; and noted that the theaters "inside are heavy with wood, fabrics, and typical Piano elegance." He called the whole complex "deceptively simple but smart.".


title: Renzo Piano

text: In the first decade of the 21st century, a wave of new art museums or museum wings were built to house the collections of wealthy art patrons. Piano, who had been building art museums since 1977, was one of the most active and creative designers of these new buildings; though the requirements and the collections were often similar, he usually succeeded in giving each museum a distinct look and personality. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, was funded with 60 million dollars by Raymond Nasher, who had made a fortune in developing shopping centers, to display his collection of modern sculpture, which includes works by Auguste Rodin, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse and Alberto Giacometti. The building is very simple in form, like his early Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and does not distract from the sculptures within; six walls of travertine marble with a glass ceiling that filters the light define five long galleries, while outside a sunken sculpture garden is placed below the street level, away sheltered from noise giving the appearance of an overgrown archeological excavation.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Zentrum Paul Klee near Bern, Switzerland (1999–2005), continued his series of art museums each very different from the others. It was designed in large part to protect the fragile drawings of Paul Klee from sunlight. It housed in a series galleries resembling rolling hills in the Swiss countryside. Piano explained that the shape of the galleries was inspired by naval architecture and the hulls of ships, which were adapted to the form of waves as his building was adapted to the landscape.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The original building of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, designed by Richard Meier, and inspired by the form of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City of Frank Lloyd Wright, opened in 1983. Piano's project added four new structures; a pavilion for exhibitions, a gallery for special collections, a building for offices, and a residence hall for the Atlanta College Of Art, creating of additional space. Both the new building and the original building are a gleaming white. A glass bridge with two levels connects the main pavilion with the original part of the museum. The careful management of external light is a particular feature of Piano's buildings; the High Museum Extension rows of curving fan-shaped panels on the facade and on the interior ceiling with filter the sunlight. From the parvis on the outside, the white facade gives the impression that the building has no weight at all.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The extension of the Morgan Library in New York City is next to the original library, a monument of Beaux-Arts architecture designed by McKim, Meade and White (1903), which had been expanded several times. Piano extensively renovated the existing structures and a built a new building the same height as the historic building, with a simple rectangular facade that complemented it. He also added a cube as a small exhibit space, an underground auditorium with 199 seats, and a glass-walled atrium which united all the parts, old and new. The architecture critic of the "New York Times", Nicolai Ouroussoff, wrote, "the result is a space with the weight of history and the lightness of clouds...a sublime expression of the architect's preoccupation with light."


title: Renzo Piano

text: Piano's design for the New York Times Building was chosen after competition whose entrants included projects by Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and Cesar Pelli. The competition rules asked for a building that be as open and transparent as possible, to symbolize the connection between the newspaper and the city. The first six floors are occupied by an atrium with restaurants, shops and a conference center. The distinctive Piano feature of the tower is the clear glass curtain wall outside the facade, and rising higher than the facade itself. The curtain is composed of clear glass and a frame of ceramic tubes suspended from the facade; it serves as a sunscreen, eliminating the need for tinted or sintered glass.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 1989, after their old museum buildings were damaged by an earthquake, the trustees of the California Academy of Sciences decided to rebuild their entire complex of twelve buildings, including an aquarium, planetarium, and a museum of Natural History, located in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Piano's plan called for "a group of volumes under a single roof, a little like a village." The roof itself, 1.5 hectares in area, was covered with vegetation, and blends with the surrounding park. The facade of the building also harmonizes smoothly with the nearby turn-of-the-century greenhouse that is a landmark of the Park. Three cupolas are placed under the high roof, ceiling, lit by natural light through round portholes on their roofs; they contain the entry hall, a botanical garden, and a planetarium. Piano's design for the new building was described by the "New York Times" as a "comforting reminder of the civilizing function of great art in a barbaric age".


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 2000 the City of Chicago launched a major program of cultural buildings in Millennium Park with a new concert hall by Frank Gehry and a new wing of the beaux-arts building Art Institute of Chicago. With its construction of glass, steel and white stone, the new wing is carefully harmonized with the old structure, and, like his other art museums, makes maximum use of natural light. A horizontal sunscreen on the roof, nicknamed the "flying carpet", is a graceful update of his rooftop art museum on the Lingotto factory in Turin. He also designed a minimalist steel bridge connecting the sculpture terrace of the museum to Millennium Park. Nikolai Ouroussof, critic of the "New York Times", noted that some aspects of the building recalled the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had made much of his career in Chicago. "The taut forms and refined details, the elevation of an industrial aesthetic to an art form all are hallmarks of Mies's work." But he noted particularly Piano's masterful control of light within the building: "...it is the light that most people will notice... The glass roof of the top-floor galleries is supported on delicate steel trusses. Rows of white blades rest on top of the trusses to filter out strong southern light; thin fabric panels soften the view from below... On a clear afternoon you can catch faint glimpses through the structural frame of clouds drifting by overhead. But most of the time the art takes center stage, everything else fading quietly into the background It is this obsessive refinement that raises Mr. Piano's best architecture to the level of art."


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Shard, built over the underground station of London Bridge, is sixty-six stories and high, which made it, when completed in 2012, the tallest skyscraper in Europe. Inside, it contains luxury residences and a hotel, along with offices, shops, restaurants, and cultural centers. It has a wide base and a split pinnacle point which seems to disappear into the clouds, like, as Piano described it, "a bell tower of the 16th century, or the mast of great ship...Often buildings of great height are aggressive and arrogant symbols of power and egoism," but the Shard is designed "to express its sharp and light presence in the urban panorama of London." Like his other tall buildings, the glass sunscreen on the exterior extends slightly above the building itself, appearing to split apart at the top. The critical reaction to the tower was predictably mixed. Simon Jenkins of the "Guardian" of London saw it as a foreign attack on the traditional London skyline and monuments: "This tower is anarchy. It conforms to no planning policy. It marks no architectural focus or rond-point. It offers no civic forum or function, just luxury flats and hotels. It stands apart from the City cluster and pays no heed to its surrounding context in scale, materials or ground presence. It seems to have lost its way from Dubai to Canary Wharf... The Shard has slashed the face of London for ever." However, Jonathan Glancy in the London "Telegraph" defended Piano's building: "The criticism – hurled against Piano like the spears of Ancient Britons fighting the civilised Romans – is, I think, a bottled up attack on our low standards of design and the beetle-browed politics that have allowed so many poor tall buildings to have been rushed up around St Paul's. The Shard, whatever its flaws – and all its many floors – is a much better building than most of the flakes below it."


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Central Saint Giles between St Giles High Street and New Oxford Street in London (2002–2010) is a complex composed of 56 luxury apartments, 53 social rented apartments, and of office around a public square with retail and food outlets, covering . The site was previously occupied by a Ministry of Defence building and is partially on the site of a medieval leper colony, St Giles Hospital. A block 109 flats rises 11 floors and is set alongside offices rising to 11 floors to the east. A distinctive element is strident solid color which is designed not to mellow with time; the buildings are covered with large kiln-fired ceramic panels glazed leaf green, orange, lime green, pale grey and yellow. "Cities should not be dull and repetitive", Piano declared. "One of the reason we find them so beautiful and interesting is that they are full of surprises; even the idea of color represents a joyful surprise."


title: Renzo Piano

text: Commissioned to design a "transformation" of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Piano designed a new building, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA (BCAM) (2008), with of space, as well as the BP Grand Entrance, an entrance pavilion with of space, and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion (2010). The BCAM facade is concrete covered with plaques of cream-colored Italian travertine, harmonizing with the older buildings of the museum complex, but added distinctive Piano touches; finlike white sun shutters on the roof softening the sunlight, a red escalator on the outside of the main facade, and a stairway suspended by red cables on the other facade, reminiscent of the Centre Pompidou. The Resnik Pavilion, to the north of the BCAM, has of space, with travertine covered walls to the east and west, glass walls on the north and south, and a roof with vertical glass shutters that open to the sky. Describing this project, Piano wrote: "It's not enough that the light is perfect. You also have a need for calm, serenity, and even a quality of voluptuousness connected with the contemplation of a work of art." Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic of "The New York Times", admired the interior of the BCAM but was less impressed by the exteriors: "There is little of the formal freedom that is at the heart of the city's architectural legacy; nor is there much evidence of the structural refinement that we have come to expect in Mr. Piano's best work. The museum's monumental travertine form and lipstick-red exterior stairways are a curious mix of pomposity and pop-culture references. It's an architecture without conviction."


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, Norway (2006–2012) was designed to revive an old port and industrial area southwest of the center of Oslo with an art museum and offices, and to provide a destination and attraction on the edge of the picturesque fjord. The project has three buildings, two museum buildings and an office building, under a single glass roof, which covers . The construction materials include both steel and wood beams. A canal and walkway connect the museum with another area under development nearby, while the museum and walkway offer views of the fjord and center of Oslo. A sculpture park with works of Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois and other notable sculptors is placed between the museum and the water. The museum building on one side of the canal holds permanent exhibits, while the building on the other side is used for temporary exhibits. A bridge over the canal the two museum buildings. The construction materials include steel, glass and wooden beams, while the facades that are not made of glass are covered with finely-crafted weathered panels, in the tradition of Scandinavian architecture.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The extension of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (2007–2013) is an addition to the museum designed by Louis Kahn the modernist architect for whom Piano worked at the beginning of his career, completed in 1972. The building faces the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by Tadao Ando (2002). The new gallery occupies , compared with for the Kahn building, and cost 135 million dollars. Piano created a dramatic new entrance for the museum, with huge windows showing the bright red furniture against the alabaster white walls within. The materials used in the new museum included light-colored concrete, to harmonize with the Kahn building, combined with beams and ceilings of Douglas fir, and floors of white oak and an abundance of double-paned and fritted glass. The museum also includes modern ecological features including a vegetal roof, photovoltaic cells on the roof, geothermal wells, and LED lighting. Piano wrote: "Our building echoes the Kahn building through its height, its scale and its general plan, but our building has a character that is more transparent and more open. Light, discreet (half of the surfaces are underground), it nonetheless has its own character and creates a dialogue between the old and the new." However, the museum also attracted critics, who said it was not ambitious enough. Mark Lamster, architecture critic of the "Dallas Morning News", wrote: "With its almost impossibly smooth walls and squared columns of titanium-treated concrete, Piano's front facade evinces a clinical, stoic perfectionism... Altogether, the assembly is a minor miracle of construction. Most impressive are the beams: 100-foot-long bars of laminated Douglas fir, trucked from Canada. But for all its technical mastery, it offers none of the elemental majesty of Kahn's building across the lawn. It is deferential to a fault."


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Whitney Museum of American Art decided to move from its original building on Madison Avenue, constructed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, to a new location at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington in Manhatttan, a neighborhood once occupied by meat packing houses, next to the High Line, a riverside highway and park. The museum, with nine levels, has an asymmetric industrial look to match the architecture of the neighborhood. In addition to its interior galleries, it has of open-air exhibit space on a large terrace atop one section of the building. It was built of steel, concrete, and stone, but also with pine wood and other materials recycled from demolished factories. Jule Iovine, architecture critic of the "Wall Street Journal", called it "a welcoming, creative machine" thanks to its "open, changeable spaces," and Michael Kimmelman, critic of the "New York Times", called it "an outdoor perch to see and be seen... There's a generosity to the architecture, a sense of art connecting with the city and vice versa".


title: Renzo Piano

text: Beginning in 2008, Piano rebuilt an existing structure to house the Harvard Art Museums, a consolidation of collections of the three art museums associated with Harvard University. The new museum preserved the picturesque brick Ivy-League facade of the 1925 Fogg Museum (1925), but added a new space in the courtyard, covered by a pyramidal glass roof, which increased the gallery space by 40 percent. The renovation adds six levels of galleries, classrooms, lecture halls, and new study areas providing access to parts of the 250,000-piece collection of the museums. The new building was opened in November 2014.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The 'City Gate' project in Valletta, Malta was the complete reorganization of the principal entrance to the Maltese capital of Valletta. It included a massive City Gate through the 16th-century city walls, an open-air theatre ‘machine’ within the ruins of the former Royal Opera House, and the construction of a new Parliament building. The gate project was controversial, though the old gate it replaced was only built in the 1960s, in the Italian rationalist style. The "theater machine" is particularly unusual; the original idea was that in summertime a steel portable theater with stage and wings and a thousand seats can be installed inside the ruins of the 19th century opera house, which had been destroyed in World War II. It has its own stage equipment and technology for reproducing the acoustics of a traditional opera house. When performances are not taking place, the "machine" was meant to turn back into a public square and gathering place. The Parliament House (2011–2015) is a mixture of modern technique and technology with the massive stone look of the city's old walls.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Centro Botín in Santander, Spain is a private sponsored project by the Fundación Botín whose aim is to be a hub for the promotion of culture both as a museum and as study centre. It consists on two buildings standing on columns over the sea line at the Bay of Santander. The western building hosts the exhibition space of and the eastern is the one dedicated to study which hosts an auditorium, study rooms and other installations. Both are connected by a suspended square and set of stairs and platforms named "pachinko". This was Piano's first project in Spain and had some controversy over its location. Critics describe the building as sublime and striking due to the conjunction of light, views and design that the buildings propose.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) in Athens, Greece is one of Piano's most dramatic projects. Located next to Falirio Bay at Kalithea, an ancient Greek port, south of central Athens, on a site which served as a parking lot for the 2004 Summer Olympics, it combines the Greek National Library and a new opera house for the Greek National Opera along with the Stavros Niarchos Park, an urban park covering an area of . An artificial hill was created to raise the building and give it a view of the nearby sea. The opera house has a 1400-seat main theater and a smaller "black box" theater of 400 seats. On top of the opera house a square horizontal glass box is placed, called "Pharos (Lighthouse)," similar to the perch of the art museum atop the Lingotto factory in Turin. The entire structure is covered by a single flat roof, which provides shade, and which is covered with of photovoltaic cells, generating 1.5 megawatts of electricity, designed to the building self-sufficient in energy during working hours. The cost of the project was 588 million dollars.


title: Renzo Piano

text: The Krause Gateway Center in downtown Des Moines, Iowa adjacent to Western Gateway Park is the headquarters for the Krause Group, parent company of Kum & Go. The architecture features long overhangs and giant glass panels.


title: Renzo Piano

text: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles is a conversion of the former May Company Department Store (1939), an Art Deco landmark opened in 2021.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 1998, Piano won the Pritzker Prize, often considered the Nobel Prize of architecture. The jury citation compared Piano to Michelangelo and da Vinci and credited him with "redefining modern and postmodern architecture."


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 2006, Piano was selected by "TIME" as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was chosen as the tenth most influential person in the "Arts and Entertainment" category.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In August 2013, he was appointed Senator for Life in the Senate by Italian president Giorgio Napolitano.


title: Renzo Piano

text: Piano founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) in 1981. In 2017 it had 150 collaborators in offices in Paris, Genoa, and New York.


title: Renzo Piano

text: In 2004, he became head of the Renzo Piano Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of the architectural profession. Since June 2008, the headquarters has been co-located with his architectural office at Punta Nave, near Genoa.


title: Renzo Piano

text: After his nomination as Senator for Life in 2013, an honour limited to five office holders in the sole gift of the Italian President, Renzo Piano set up a team of young architects called G124 whose mission is to work on the transformation of Italy's major cities’ suburbs. Team members are paid with Renzo Piano senator's salary and change every year through a public selection. Projects have been developed in Turin, Milan, Padua, Venice and Rome.


title: Renzo Piano

text: Piano resides in Paris with his second wife Milly and four children, Carlo, Matteo, Lia - from his first wife - and Giorgio.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, often shortened to Sky Captain, is a 2004 science fiction action-adventure film written and directed by Kerry Conran in his directorial debut, and produced by Jon Avnet, Sadie Frost, Jude Law and Marsha Oglesby. It stars Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie. It is an example of "Ottensian" (pre-WWII) "dieselpunk".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser using a bluescreen set up in his living room and a Macintosh IIci. He was able to show it to Avnet, who was so impressed that Avnet spent two years working with him on his screenplay. No major studio was interested, but Avnet convinced Aurelio De Laurentiis to finance "Sky Captain" without a distribution deal (a worldwide distribution deal would later happen with Paramount Pictures).


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators, and compositors created the multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live-action footage, while the entire film was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then recreated as CGI animatics. Ten months prior to shooting the live-action scenes, Conran first shot them with stand-ins in Los Angeles, then converted that footage to animatics so the actors could accurately envision the film.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: "Sky Captain" received largely positive reviews, particularly for the style of filming that was used; some criticism was directed at the plot and characterization. Despite being a box office flop, generating only $58 million on a $70 million budget, the film has since gained a following and is regarded as a cult classic. It was one of the first major films, along with "Casshern", "Immortal" (both 2004) and "Sin City" (2005), to be shot entirely on a "digital backlot", blending actors with CG surroundings.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: In a technologically advanced 1939, the zeppelin "Hindenburg III" moors itself atop the Empire State Building. Aboard the airship is Dr. Jorge Vargas, a scientist who arranges for a package containing two vials to be delivered to Dr. Walter Jennings. Afterwards, Dr. Vargas vanishes.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Polly Perkins, a reporter for "The Chronicle", is looking into the disappearances of Vargas and five other renowned scientists. A cryptic message leads her to Radio City Music Hall, against the warnings of her editor, Mr. Paley, where she meets Dr. Jennings during a showing of "The Wizard of Oz." He tells her that a Dr. Totenkopf is coming for him next. Suddenly, mysterious giant robots attack the city. The authorities call for "Sky Captain" Joe Sullivan, the city's hero, Perkins' former lover, and the commander of the private air force the Flying Legion. While Joe engages the robots with his modified Curtiss P-40 pursuit fighter, Perkins photographs from the street with little regard for her safety. He eventually manages to disable one robot; the rest leave thereafter. News reports show similar attacks around the globe. The disabled robot is taken back to the Legion's air base so that technology expert Dex can examine it. Polly follows and persuades Joe to reluctantly let her in on the investigation. Her information takes them to the ransacked laboratory of a dying Dr. Jennings, while an assassin escapes. Just before he dies, Jennings gives Polly the two vials and states that they are crucial to Totenkopf's plans. Polly hides the vials and withholds the information from Joe. They return to the Legion's base just before it comes under attack from squadrons of ornithopter drones. Dex tracks the origin of the signal controlling the drones and notes it on a map before his capture.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Joe and Polly find Dex's map and fly to Nepal and then Tibet, where they discover an abandoned mining outpost and meet Joe's old friend Kaji. Two guides working for Totenkopf force Polly to turn over the vials, locking the duo in a room full of dynamite. Joe and Polly manage to escape just before the room explodes, knocking them unconscious and destroying most of Polly's film. They wake up together in the mythical Shangri-La. The Tibetan-speaking monks there tell of Totenkopf's enslavement of their people, forcing them to work in the uranium mines. Most were killed by the radiation, but the final survivor provides a clue to where Dr. Totenkopf is hiding. With insufficient fuel to make it there, they run into a Royal Navy flying aircraft carrier commanded by another of Joe's former flames, Commander Franky Cook. Franky leads the attack on Totenkopf's island lair while Joe and Polly enter through an underwater inlet. Joe and Polly find themselves on an island with dinosaur-like creatures, which Polly hesitates to photograph as she has only two shots left. They find a secret subterranean facility in a mountain, where robots are loading animals, as well as the mysterious vials, onto a large "Noah's Ark" rocket. Joe and Polly are detected but Dex, piloting a flying barge, arrives with three of the missing scientists. They explain that Totenkopf has given up on humanity and seeks to start the world over again: the "World of Tomorrow". The vials are genetic material for a new Adam and Eve; if the rocket reaches space, the afterburners will ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone on Earth.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: As the group attempts to enter Dr. Totenkopf's lair, one scientist is electrocuted by the defense system. A hologram of Totenkopf appears, speaking of his hate for humanity and his plans to rebuild it as a new master race. Dex disables the lair's defenses and the group discovers Totenkopf's mummified corpse inside with a scrap of paper clutched in his hand: "forgive me". He died 20 years previously, but his machines have continued his plan. Joe decides to sabotage the rocket from the inside while the others escape. Polly tries to tag along but Joe kisses her and then knocks her out. Polly recovers, following Joe and saving him from Dr. Jennings' assassin, a female robot. Joe and Polly then board the rocket. Before the rocket reaches 100 km, when its second stage is scheduled to fire and thereby incinerate the Earth, Polly pushes an emergency button that ejects all the animals in escape pods. Joe tries to disable the rocket only to be interrupted by the same assassin robot. He jolts the robot with its electric weapon and then uses it on the controls, disabling the rocket. Joe and Polly use the last pod to save themselves as the rocket explodes. Joe and Polly watch the animal pods splash down around their escape pod, while Commander Cook leads a group of flying aircraft carriers towards them. Polly then uses the last shot on her camera to take a picture of Joe rather than the animal pods. Joe notes that she had forgotten to take the lens cap off.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Laurence Olivier had been deceased for nearly 13 years at the time of filming and was depicted in the film for the role of Dr. Totenkopf, the mysterious mad scientist and supervillain via computer manipulation of video and audio from when he was a young actor. The novelization written by Kevin J. Anderson gives the full names for Dex and Editor Paley as Dexter Dearborn and Morris Paley.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Kerry Conran grew up on films and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s. His parents encouraged him and his brother Kevin to develop their creative sides. He studied at a feeder program for Disney animators at CalArts and became interested in 2-D computer animation. While there, he realized it was possible to apply some of the techniques associated with animation to live-action. Two years later, it seemed apparent to him that Hollywood would never take a chance on an inexperienced, first-time filmmaker—so he decided to make the movie himself.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Conran was influenced by the designs of Norman Bel Geddes, an industrial designer who did work for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and designed exhibits for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Geddes also designed an Airliner Number 4 that was to fly from Chicago to London.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Another key influence was Hugh Ferriss, one of the designers for the 1939 New York World's Fair who designed bridges and huge housing complexes. He was an American delineator (one who creates perspective drawings of buildings) and architect. In 1922, skyscraper architect Harvey Wiley Corbett commissioned Ferriss to draw a series of four step-by-step perspectives demonstrating the architectural consequences of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. These four drawings would later be used in his 1929 book "The Metropolis of Tomorrow" (Dover Publications, 2005, ).


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Regarding the 1939 New York World's Fair itself and its futuristic theme of the World of Tomorrow, Conran noted: "... obviously the title refers to the World Expo and the spirit of that was looking at the future with a sense of optimism and a sense of the whimsical, you know, something that we've lost a lot in our fantasies. We're more cynical, more practical, ... I think what this film attempts to do is to take that enthusiasm and innocence and celebrate it-to not get mired in the practicality that we're fixated upon today."


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Conran acknowledged his debt to German Expressionism, which was particularly evident in the opening scenes in New York City: "Early German cinema was born of just a completely different aesthetic than what we see nowadays. One of the last things I watched before starting this project was the "Dr. Mabuse" series that Lang had doneterribly inspirational, the use of art and propaganda even."


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Conran summarized his influences: "We tried to approach it almost as though we lived in that era and were just another group of artists trying to make a work out of those pieces and inspirations. We wanted the film to feel like a lost film of that era. If we're a footnote in the history of pulp art and Golden Age comics, that'd be enough, that'd be great. If we even just inspire some people to go back and investigate some of that stuff, we'd have done enough."


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: "Sky Captain" has a number of commonalities with Hayao Miyazaki's anime movie "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" (1986). The sky pirates' focus on primitive mechanics, large airships, and military cultures is similar. Both stories center on an evil madman controlling an island of high technology, and the search for that island. "Laputa" has the evil madman searching for the island, but "Sky Captain" has the island as the madman's base from the beginning. "Sky Captain"s message is largely about the film genre, but "Laputa" has strong anti-war and anti-technology themes, found in most of Miyazaki's work. Both pay homage to the 1941 "Superman" animated short "The Mechanical Monsters".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: In 1994, Conran began assembling moviemaking tools, including a bluescreen in his living room. He was not interested in working his way through the system and instead wanted to follow the route of independent filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh. Initially, Kerry and his brother had nothing more than "just a vague idea of this guy who flew a plane. We would talk about all the obvious things like "Indiana Jones" and all the stuff we liked." Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer in the style of an old-fashioned movie serial on his Macintosh IIci personal computer. Once finished, Conran showed it to producer Marsha Oglesby, who was a friend of his brother's wife and she recommended that he let producer Jon Avnet see it. Conran met Avnet and showed him the trailer. Conran told him that he wanted to make it into a movie. They spent two or three days just talking about the tone of the movie.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Avnet and Conran spent two years working on the screenplay, which included numerous genre-related references and homages, and developing a working relationship. Then, the producer took the script and the trailer and began approaching actors. In order to protect Conran's vision, Avnet decided to shoot the movie independently with a lot of his own money. The producer realized that "the very thing that made this film potentially so exciting for me, and I think for an audience, was the personal nature of it and the singularity of the vision, which would never succeed and never survive the development process within a studio."


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Avnet convinced Aurelio De Laurentiis to finance the film without a distribution deal (Paramount Pictures would later acquire worldwide distribution rights to the film). Nine months before filming, Avnet had Conran meet the actors and begin rehearsals in an attempt to get the shy filmmaker out of his shell. Avnet set up a custom digital effects studio with a blue screen soundstage in an abandoned building in Van Nuys, California. A group of almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators, and compositors created multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live action footage yet to be filmed.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: The entire movie was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then re-created as computer-generated 3D animatics with all of the 2D background photographs digitally painted to resemble the 1939 setting. With the animatics as a guide, grids were created to map camera and actor movements with digital characters standing in for the real actors. The grids were made into actual maps on the blue screen stage floor to help the actors move around invisible scenery.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Ten months before Conran made the movie with his actors, he shot it entirely with stand-ins in Los Angeles and then created the whole movie in animatics so that the actors had an idea of what the film would look like and where to move on the soundstage. To prepare for the film, Conran had his cast watch old movies, such as Lauren Bacall in "To Have and Have Not" (1944) for Paltrow's performance and "The Thin Man" (1934) for the relationship between Nick and Nora that was to be echoed in the one between Joe and Polly. Avnet constantly pushed for room in this meticulously designed movie for the kind of freedom the actors needed, like being able to move around on the soundstage.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Conran and Avnet were able to cut costs considerably by shooting the entire movie in 26 days — far less than the three-to-four month schedules usually allotted to blockbuster films — on high-definition video using a Sony HDW-F900 and working on three blue screens, mainly on Stage 2 (George Lucas Stage) at Elstree Studios in London, England with one notable exception. Conran wrote a scene that was added later in which Polly talks to her editor in his office that was shot on a physical set because there was no time to shoot it on a blue screen soundstage. The footage from the HD camera was run through a switcher and then through a Macintosh computer running Final Cut Pro that allowed the filmmakers to line up the animatics with the live onstage footage. Conran said, "I don't know how we would have made this movie. It's really what allowed us to line up everything, given there was nothing there." After each day of shooting, footage was edited and sent overnight to editors in Los Angeles who added CG and sent it back.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: After filming ended, they put together a 24-minute presentation and took it to every studio in June 2003. There was a lot of interest and Avnet selected the studio that gave Conran the most creative control. They needed studio backing to finish the film's ambitious visuals. At one point, the producer remembers that Conran was "working 18 to 20 hours a day for a long period of time. It's 2,000 some odd CG shots done in one year, and we literally had to write code to figure out how to do this stuff!" Most of the post-production work was done on Mac workstations using After Effects for compositing and Final Cut Pro for editing (seven workstations were dedicated to visual effects and production editing). The distinctive look of the film was achieved by running footage through a diffusion filter and then tinting it in black and white before color was blended, balanced and added back in.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989, posthumously appears as the villain and mad scientist Dr. Totenkopf. His likeness was produced using digitally manipulated archival BBC footage of the actor and thus adding one more film to his repertoire. A similar technique was used two years later in "Superman Returns" (2006) with Marlon Brando.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Avnet cultivated a calculated release for the movie by first moving its release date from mid-2004, one week before "Spider-Man 2", to September. He courted the Internet press and finally made an appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con with key cast members in an attempt to generate some advance buzz.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: The composer Edward Shearmur wrote the film's orchestral score in the style of Hollywood's golden-age composers, and the film's end-title sequence featured a new recording of the song "Over the Rainbow" sung by the American jazz singer Jane Monheit, which were all featured on Sony Classical's original motion picture soundtrack recording. La-La Land Records released a limited edition 2-disc set in 2017 with the complete score.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" had high box office expectations, opening in first place on its September 17, 2004 release date and grossing on its opening weekend. However, the film only grossed $37.7 million in North America, below its estimated $70 million budget. It grossed $20.1 million in the rest of the world, making its final worldwide tally $57.9 million. The film is considered a box office flop.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Kevin Conran disputed this budget figure in a 2015 interview. "I take great issue with that [budget figure] personally and I'd like someone to show me where all that money went ... I don't support those numbers and I never have. We walked into Jon Avnet's office that first day and he said, 'What do you want for the production?' and we said $3 million. We could have done a version of this film for $3 million. It would have been black-and-white and sans name actors ..."


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: "But even still, this whole thing was going to be under $20 million. How it went from 20 to 70, you tell me."


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 70% based on 221 reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The site's critical consensus states: ""Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is slim on plot and characterization, but the visuals more than make up for it".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: On Metacritic the film has a score of 64 out of 100 based on reviews from 36 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Roger Ebert was among those who strongly supported the film, giving it a 4 out of a possible 4 stars and praising it for "its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark". It's like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: In his review for the "Chicago Reader", J.R. Jones wrote, "This debut feature by Kerry Conran is a triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste". "Entertainment Weekly" gave the film an "A−" rating, saying, "The investment is optimistic and wise; "Sky Captain" is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: Other critics' enthusiasm was somewhat tempered. For instance, Stephen Holden of "The New York Times" lauded its visuals and its evocation of a bygone era but said that "the monochromatic variations on sepia keep the actors and their adventures at a refined aesthetic distance ... At times the film is hard to see. And as the action accelerates, the wonder of its visual concept starts giving way to sci-fi clichés".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: "USA Today" said that the film was "all style over substance, a clever parlor trick but a dull movie".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: The army of giant robots seen in the film – both flying over the city and later various models in Sky Captain's massive warehouse, particularly one designated as number "5" – are a homage to the Paramount Pictures "Superman" cartoon "The Mechanical Monsters" (1941), produced by Fleischer Studios. The radio signal tower calling for Sky Captain is a stylized version of the color RKO logo. The giant robots heat rays use the same sound effects as the Martian flying machines from the 1953 version of "The War of the Worlds".


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: When early in the film newspaper clippings from around the globe are shown, in the Japanese newspaper the iconic silhouette of Godzilla is clearly visible. Similarly, during the New York sequence when Sky Captain deploys a bomb to stop a giant robot, the shape of King Kong can be seen on the Empire State Building in the background.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: During the underwater dogfight sequence, a light momentarily displays the wreckage of a ship with the name "Venture" – the tramp steamer that sailed to Skull Island in the 1933 version of "King Kong". The same scene shows what appears to be the wreckage of the RMS "Titanic", and an ancient underwater city which seems to be a nod to the legend of Atlantis.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: The villain's main logo bears striking similarities to the logo for "Crimson Skies", a game universe that some critics noted bears stylistic and plot similarities to the film.


title: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

text: The Flying Legion is a homage to pulp magazine and comic book heroes such as G-8 and his Battle Aces, Captain Midnight, and the Blackhawk squadron. Production designer Kevin Conran, the brother of director Kerry Conran, based the design of the flying humanoid robots, in part, on the helmet worn by the DC Comics superhero Adam Strange and the flight controls for Commando Cody's rocket-pack.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: "Doña" Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (12 November 1648 – 17 April 1695) was a Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, and Hieronymite nun. Her contributions to the Spanish Golden Age gained her the nicknames of "The Tenth Muse" or "The Phoenix of America"; historian Stuart Murray calls her a flame that rose from the ashes of "religious authoritarianism".


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: Sor Juana lived during Mexico's colonial period, making her a contributor both to early Spanish literature as well as to the broader literature of the Spanish Golden Age. Beginning her studies at a young age, Sor Juana was fluent in Latin and also wrote in Nahuatl, and became known for her philosophy in her teens. Sor Juana educated herself in her own library, which was mostly inherited from her grandfather. After joining a nunnery in 1667, Sor Juana began writing poetry and prose dealing with such topics as love, environmentalism, feminism, and religion. She turned her nun's quarters into a salon, visited by New Spain's female intellectual elite, including "Doña" , Marchioness of Mancera, and "Doña" Maria Luisa Gonzaga, , both "Vicereines" of the New Spain, amongst others. Her criticism of misogyny and the hypocrisy of men led to her condemnation by the Bishop of Puebla, and in 1694 she was forced to sell her collection of books and focus on charity towards the poor. She died the next year, having caught the plague while treating her sisters.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: After she had faded from academic discourse for hundreds of years, Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz re-established Sor Juana's importance in modern times. Scholars now interpret Sor Juana as a protofeminist, and she is the subject of vibrant discourse about themes such as colonialism, education rights, women's religious authority, and writing as examples of feminist advocacy. <section end="Modern" criticism="" of="" the="" catholic="" church="" transclusion="" />


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: "Doña" Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana was born in San Miguel Nepantla (now called "Nepantla de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz") near Mexico City. Owing to her Spanish ancestry and Mexican birth, Inés is considered a Criolla. She was the illegitimate child of Don Pedro Manuel de Asuaje y Vargas-Machuca, a Spanish officer, and Doña Isabel Ramírez de Santillana y Rendón, a wealthy criolla, who inhabited the Hacienda of Panoaya, close to Mexico City. She was baptized on 2 December 1651 with the name of “Inés” ("Juana" was only added after she entered the convent) described on the baptismal rolls as "a daughter of the Church". The name “Inés” came from her maternal aunt “Doña” Inés Ramírez de Santillana, who received the name herself from her Andalusian grandmother “Doña” Inés de Brenes. The name “Inés” was also present through their cousin Doña Inés de Brenes y Mendoza, married to a grandson of , the first ever published American-born poet.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: Her biological father, according to all accounts, was completely absent from her life. However, thanks to her maternal grandfather, who owned a very productive "hacienda" in Amecameca, Inés lived a comfortable life with her mother on his estate, Panoaya, accompanied by an illustrious group of relatives who constantly visited or were visited in their surrounding haciendas.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: During her childhood, Inés often hid in the "hacienda" chapel to read her grandfather's books from the adjoining library, something forbidden to girls. By the age of three, she had learned how to read and write Latin. By the age of five, she reportedly could do accounts. At age eight, she composed a poem on the Eucharist. By adolescence, Inés had mastered Greek logic, and at age thirteen she was teaching Latin to young children. She also learned the Aztec language of Nahuatl and wrote some short poems in that language.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: In 1664, at the age of 16, Inés was sent to live in Mexico City. She even asked her mother's permission to disguise herself as a male student so that she could enter the university there, without success. Without the ability to obtain formal education, Juana continued her studies privately. Her family's influential position had gained her the position of lady-in-waiting at the colonial viceroy's court, where she came under the tutelage of the Vicereine "Donna" , member of one of Italy's most illustrious families, and wife of the Viceroy of New Spain Don Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, Marquis of Mancera. The viceroy Marquis de Mancera, wishing to test the learning and intelligence of the 17-year-old, invited several theologians, jurists, philosophers, and poets to a meeting, during which she had to answer many questions unprepared and explain several difficult points on various scientific and literary subjects. The manner in which she acquitted herself astonished all present and greatly increased her reputation. Her literary accomplishments garnered her fame throughout New Spain. She was much admired in the viceregal court, and she received several proposals of marriage, which she declined.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: In 1667, she entered the Monastery of St. Joseph, a community of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, as a postulant, where she remained but a few months. Later, in 1669, she entered the monastery of the Hieronymite nuns, which had more relaxed rules, where she changed her name to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, probably in reference to Sor Juana de la Cruz Vázquez Gutiérrez who was a Spanish nun whose erudition earned her one of the few dispensations for women to preach the gospel. Another potential namesake was Saint Juan de la Cruz, one of the most accomplished authors of the Spanish Baroque. She chose to become a nun so that she could study as she wished since she wanted "to have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study."


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: In the convent and perhaps earlier, Sor Juana became intimate friends with fellow savant, Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, who visited her in the convent's locutorio. She stayed cloistered in the Convent of Santa Paula of the Hieronymite in Mexico City from 1669 until her death in 1695, and there she studied, wrote, and collected a large library of books. The Viceroy and Vicereine of New Spain became her patrons; they supported her and had her writings published in Spain. She addressed some of her poems to paintings of her friend and patron María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, daughter of Vespasiano Gonzaga, Duca di Guastala, Luzara e Rechiolo and Inés María Manrique, 9th Countess de Paredes, which she also addressed as Lísida.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: In November 1690, the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz published, under the pseudonym of Sor Filotea, and without her permission, Sor Juana's critique of a 40-year-old sermon by Father António Vieira, a Portuguese Jesuit preacher. Although Sor Juana's intentions for the work, called "" are left to interpretation, many scholars have opted to interpret the work as a challenge to the hierarchical structure of religious authority. Along with "," the bishop also published his own letter in which he said she should focus on religious instead of secular studies. He published his criticisms to use them to his advantage against the priest, and while he agreed with her criticisms, he believed that as a woman, she should devote herself to prayer and give up her writings.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: In response to her critics, Sor Juana wrote a letter, "Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz" ("Reply to Sister Philotea"), in which she defended women's right to formal education. She also advocated for women's right to serve as intellectual authorities, not only through the act of writing, but also through the publication of their writing. By putting women, specifically older women, in positions of authority, Sor Juana argued, women could educate other women. Resultingly, Sor Juana argued, this practice could also avoid potentially dangerous situations involving male teachers in intimate settings with young female students. In 1691, she was reprimanded and ordered to stop writing after the exposure of a private letter in which she wrote of the right of women to education.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: In addition to her status as a woman in a self-prescribed position of authority, Sor Juana's radical position made her an increasingly controversial figure. She famously remarked by quoting an Aragonese poet and echoing St. Teresa of Ávila: "One can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper." In response, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, Archbishop of Mexico joined other high-ranking officials in condemning Sor Juana's "waywardness." In addition to opposition she received for challenging the patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church, Sor Juana was repeatedly criticized for believing that her writing could achieve the same philanthropic goals as community work.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: By 1693, she seemingly ceased to write, rather than risking official censure. Although there is no undisputed evidence of her renouncing devotion to letters, there are documents showing her agreeing to undergo penance. Her name is affixed to such a document in 1694, but given her deep natural lyricism, the tone of the supposed handwritten penitentials is in rhetorical and autocratic Church formulae; one is signed ""Yo, la Peor de Todas"" (""I, the worst of all women""). She is said to have sold all her books, then an extensive library of over 4,000 volumes, and her musical and scientific instruments as well. Other sources report that her defiance toward the Church led to the confiscation of all of her books and instruments, although the bishop himself agreed with the contents of her letters.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: Of over one hundred unpublished works, only a few of her writings have survived, which are known as the "Complete Works". According to Octavio Paz, her writings were saved by the vicereine.


title: Juana Inés de la Cruz

text: She died after ministering to other nuns stricken during a plague, on 17 April 1695. Sigüenza y Góngora delivered the eulogy at her funeral.<section end="Modern" criticism="" of="" the="" catholic="" church="" transclusion="" />