Abitare Being Renzo Piano is now on iPad

The adaptation for iPad of Abitare special issue 497, November 2009 “Being Renzo Piano” is now available

This entirely different issue of the magazine presents the “world as seen through the eye of Renzo Piano” (the first in a series of issues devoted to international architects) and takes the familiar format of the printed edition of the magazine while giving it added appeal through a whole set of interactive functions.
The content is organised chronologically and can be accessed by a timeline, and this makes it possible to browse the articles on a day-by-day basis(calling up the material onto the screen and zooming in to points of particular interest), as if the reader were consulting a travel diary covering six months in the life and career of Renzo Piano. The diary was recorded “live” by Abitare’s reporters Anna Foppiano and Giovanna Silva, who followed him as he visited construction sites, carried out inspections, attended openings and planned all of his many meetings with partners. Visiting with Renzo Piano his atelier-studios in Genoa, Paris and New York, travelling with him to Malta,Athens, Paris, Venice, Cambridge (NY), Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to discover in detail his day-to-day life, to highlight the secrets and the people that are behind RPBW, his remarkable design and production “machine”, in order to report in real time his main works in progress.

The Piano City browse method, meanwhile, presents 40 years of work done by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with in-depth reports on the various individual design projects featuring factsheets,critical articles and illustrations which have been published in Abitare over the last 50 years. Videos (in Italian with English subtitles) give readers a chance to meet the man himself. Developed in partnership with CEFRIEL - Politecnico
di Milano for optimum usability on an international level, the Abitare - Being Renzo Piano application is bilingual (Italian and English, adapting automatically to the language to which the iPad is set).
Updates adding new content are planned, together with innovative ways of viewing and “visiting” Renzo Piano’s design work. The idea over time is to add more in-depth analysis concerning Piano’s latest construction sites, all of which will make this application a dynamic resource that keeps users abreast of developments as they happen. The Abitare - Being Renzo Piano application costs 9.99 euros and is available from Apple’s App Store.

The adaptation for iPad of Abitare special issue is done by:
Stefano Boeri
(editor in chief)
Mario Piazza
(co-editor and art director)
Edited by:
Anna Foppiano
Giovanna Silva (photos)
Graphic design:
Fabio Grazioli
Carla Brusaferri
Elena Liberatore

Editing:
Alessia Pincini
iPad Application design
and development:
CEFRIEL – ICT Institute
Politecnico di Milano