WHEN BEAUTY PROTECTS: ARCHITECTURE AND INNOVATION TO BUILD THE FUTURE
Interview with Emanuela Baglietto, partner and architect at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop
In a time marked by environmental crises, urban fragility, and growing awareness, architecture can no longer be just an aesthetic gesture. It is responsibility. It is care. It is the construction of trust.
Emanuela Baglietto, partner at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, knows it very well. For over thirty years, she has contributed to internationally renowned projects – from the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and most recently, Istanbul Modern.
Today, she is leading the new Piloti Tower of the Port of Genoa, an engineering and architectural symbol marking the return of beauty to a place tragically scarred.
We spoke with her about form, structure, innovation, and the architect’s role as a guardian of both beauty and safety.
Architect Baglietto, let’s start with you. What does designing mean to you today?
Designing today is a deeply conscious act; it is no longer merely an exercise in form, function, and technique. It means responding to epochal challenges: climate crises, global migrations, growing inequalities, and limited resources. In this context, the act of design takes on a fundamental social, cultural, and environmental significance.
What responsibility does architecture have in an era when cities must adapt, protect, and inspire all at once?
The contemporary city is the primary testing ground for this challenge. It is here that the most acute contradictions of our time converge: development and decay, opportunity and exclusion, innovation and fragility. It is within this complex context that architecture must learn to adapt, protect, and inspire.
To protect means, on one hand, the need to reduce environmental impact, and on the other, to improve the quality of urban life. Cities must transform into sustainable organisms, capable of mitigating heat islands, fostering biodiversity, and efficiently managing water and resources. But protection also means ensuring inclusive, safe, and accessible spaces for everyone.
To inspire, finally, remains the noblest and most difficult task. Architecture still has the duty to generate beauty, to shape collective dreams, and to build identity. In a world marked by deep uncertainty, well-designed spaces can restore dignity, a sense of belonging, and trust in the future. Inspiration arises from the delicate balance between roots and innovation, between memory and forward-looking vision.
How do architectural aesthetics and engineering efficiency intertwine? Is there still a conflict between beauty and technology, or does innovation today open up new possibilities for a virtuous coexistence?
There are no longer two separate worlds. Architectural aesthetics and engineering efficiency are now part of a single creative process. Thanks to digital technologies, new materials, and growing environmental awareness, form and structure can finally grow together. Technology is no longer a constraint to be respected; it is a tool to unleash design expression.
Beauty, in turn, is not just an artistic gesture: it is born from constructive intelligence, efficiency, durability, resilience, and respect for the environment. Nature is the greatest teacher in this regard, showing us light, flexible structures capable of adapting to climate, context, and time.
Architecture inspired by nature speaks a similar language: it builds with precision, optimizes, harmonizes. The real challenge lies here: to make beauty and technology dialogue, allowing them to evolve together. When this happens, architecture emerges that not only meets present needs but also nourishes imagination, generates trust, and builds the future.
In the Piloti Tower project, how did you integrate the structural and architectural aspects?
The challenge was clear from the very beginning: to combine lightness and visual dynamism with absolute solidity, in a context exposed to complex natural forces and significant dynamic loads. It wasn’t enough to guarantee strength; it had to be done with elegance, without compromising aesthetic quality.
At the same time, we needed to ensure maximum comfort for those who would use the tower every day: the port pilots, at the operational heart of Genoa. Achieving this balance required thorough work at every level of the project: advanced structural analyses, refined numerical modeling, and wind tunnel testing.
We adopted cutting-edge technologies, including lightweight but highly effective damping systems capable of reducing vibrations without adding weight to the structural framework. Nothing was left to chance.
The result is a tower that speaks the language of engineering but with a clear and recognizable architectural tone, where technology and form merge naturally and seamlessly.
What does it mean to design knowing that the structure must also save lives in the event of an extreme event?
Designing the new Piloti Tower in Genoa has meant, above all, taking on a profound responsibility: toward the city, its memory, but most importantly toward the people who will rely on that tower every day to ensure safe navigation in the port.
In such a delicate context, the structure is not just a technical work or a formal exercise. It is a promise. It is concrete protection. It must guarantee absolute stability and total resistance, but also be welcoming, functional, and livable.
In this project, engineering becomes care, and architecture serves trust. It is not just a building being constructed: it is a stronghold, a fixed point on the boundary between land and sea, between risk and safety.
What role does innovation—such as intelligent monitoring systems and seismic protection technologies like those offered by ISAAC—play in redefining the relationship between architecture and safety?
Technologies such as intelligent monitoring and seismic protection systems—like the solutions developed by ISAAC—are transforming safety from a passive element into an active and dynamic presence within buildings. Today, design is no longer just about resisting an extreme event. It’s about anticipating it, sensing it in real time, and adapting to its consequences before they fully manifest.
Buildings equipped with these systems don’t merely withstand risk; they monitor it, process it, and respond to it. This is a radical shift, turning the structure into an active entity capable of protecting its occupants with intelligence, awareness, and readiness.
Do you think these tools are opening new possibilities to design spaces that are not only beautiful but also deeply “alive”?
These systems make structures not only safer but also capable of sensing their environment, reacting, and intelligently protecting the people who inhabit them. They don’t simply enhance safety; they make structures more aware, more responsive, more “alive”: able to read what’s happening around them, interpret signals, and respond in real time. Capable of providing intelligent protection and care for their occupants.
It’s a new concept of the built environment—not just a container anymore, but an active organism.
How do these technologies transform your everyday approach to design?
These technologies open up new possibilities: the building can actively adapt and protect itself, allowing the structure to be lighter and enabling a different balance between form and function. It becomes possible to create designs that are not only lighter and more efficient but also deeply welcoming and reassuring.
In everyday practice, this means integrating these technologies from the earliest stages of the project, making them an integral part of the building’s very framework. It means engineering and architecture working side by side, in a continuous dialogue between aesthetics, technology, and innovation.
This has always been an integral part of our design methodology.
Which places will have the greatest need for architecture integrated with technological solutions in the coming years (hospitals, schools, private buildings, public spaces)?
Certainly, the places that will most need architecture integrated with new technologies are those that impact our daily lives: hospitals, schools, public spaces, but not only these. Places where safety is not an option but an essential condition for care, learning, and social interaction.
Today, buildings must become intelligent. Not just resilient, but adaptive, sensitive, and capable of taking care of their occupants. Think of hospitals that monitor their structural conditions in real time, schools that can respond to seismic or climatic emergencies, and public spaces that become “urban organisms” — alive, responsive, connected to the environment, and able to meet its challenges.
But private buildings are also set to transform, offering comfort, energy efficiency, and active protection through intelligent monitoring and response systems.
How can we train designers who can combine a human vision with technical innovation?
To train a new generation of humanist designers, a multidisciplinary approach is needed, combining architecture, engineering, environmental sciences, and also digital culture. It is essential to develop a design sensitivity that integrates beauty, functionality, and responsibility.
We must teach how to design spaces that are beautiful because they are safe and intelligent, and that can evolve and adapt alongside society. Today, designers need to create places that both protect and inspire at the same time.
Are you interested in discovering more insights from authoritative voices in engineering and architecture who have collaborated with ISAAC?
Read the interview with Gian Michele Calvi — professor, engineer, and innovator — by clicking below.
ISAAC’s technical team is ready to provide preventive analyses without constraints on public, hospital, religious, and industrial buildings, aiming to identify potential weaknesses and opportunities for intervention. We offer a practical approach to guide administrations and organizations through a process of conscious and lasting structural protection before emergencies arise.
At ISAAC, we combine commitment and innovation to promote conscious protection, capable of transforming risk into resilience.
Discover more about us!
