"The world of cinema also fascinates me because of the way it works: to make a good film, many different factors have to combine and work together. A good story is not enough, you need a good director, good actors, a good cinematographer. You need a good soundtrack, and good editing can radically change the fate of a film. In this respect, it is similar to the work of constructing buildings, where architects, engineers, technicians and builders collaborate. In fact, in this job, the client immediately understood the need for different voices to agree on the project. Both disciplines, film and architecture, are a mixture of art and technology. The very name of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reflects this coexistence and collaboration. In cinema, as in architecture, technology is not divorced from creativity. There is a constant tension between the technical work and the emotional result”.

Renzo Piano tells with this words the story of the birth of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the most important cinema museum in the world. Born in the famous “Miracle Mile”, in the heart of Los Angeles, at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The museum preserves the 1939 former May Company department store and gives it new life with the spherical building, the 1000 seats David Geffen Theatre and the Dolby Family Terrace overlooking Hollywood.

This volume, the fourteenth in the series edited by the Renzo Piano Foundation, continues to accompany the reader like a travel notebook to discover the extraordinary adventure that is the architect's profession through the documentation of the archives of RPBW and the Rezo Piano Foundation.