An Italian Architect's Wild American Dream

Renzo Picasso shared his last name with legendary Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and his first name with another, more well-known Italian architect: Renzo Piano.

But Renzo Giovanni Battista Picasso, born in 1880 in Genoa, Italy, was clearly his own man. An inventor, engineer, and designer with a taste for the fantastical, his whimsical and weird ideas reflect what urbanists of a century ago envisioned as the American city of the future.