Renzo Piano designed one of high-tech architecture's seminal buildings – the Centre Pompidou. Continuing our high-tech architecture series, we profile the Italian architect who was a key figure in the largely British-led movement. Piano would tell you that he doesn't have a signature style, that he finds the idea of it inhibiting. He likes to treat every project as a problem requiring its own practical solution.

However, there is no denying that, across his wide-ranging portfolio of projects, engineering and technology play an important part. As the architect of the Centre Pompidou he was a key figure within high-tech architecture, the style that emerged in the UK in the late 1960s and celebrates structural elements.