He graduated from Milan Polytechnic in 1964. During his university years, he worked for the Franco Albini firm and completed his practical training by frequenting his father's construction sites. Between 1965 and 1970, numerous research and working trips took him to the United States and Great Britain. In 1971, he founded the firm Piano & Rogers with Richard Rogers, his partner in the Centre Pompidou project in Paris. In 1977, he opened the Atelier Piano & Rice with engineer Peter Rice, who worked with him for many years, collaborating on numerous projects until his death in 1993. Finally, he founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with offices in Paris and Genoa and a staff of around one hundred architects, engineers and specialists. In the 1980s, he designed the Teso series for FontanaArte, comprising a table, a bookcase and a console. These furnishing objects, imbued with extraordinary personality, are designed with glass as the main raw material, and become monoblocs thanks to a load-bearing structure of metal tie rods.