Top Italian architect Renzo Piano is to design the new Maltese parliament building, Malta's Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said Tuesday.
The new building will be constructed in the area currently occupied by the ruins of the city's Opera House, which was destroyed by bombs in WWII, and the project should be completed within five years, Gonzi said.
The Maltese parliament will move from its current base at the 16th-century Grand Master's Palace, which it has occupied for 30 years.
Piano, 71, has announced several other important projects this year, including the design of a new complex on the coast near Athens which will provide a new home for the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Opera, and a building that will complement Vienna's new central station complex.
In September Piano opened his new venue for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, which includes a natural history museum, an acquarium and a planetarium.
Dubbed one of the 'greenest' buildings in the world, the academy's roof is covered with 1.5 million small plants native to California as well as 60,000 solar panels.
In February he inaugurated the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles, which now houses the contemporary art collection of American billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and forms part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) complex.
The Genoese architect has designed a host of major buildings around the world including the Pompidou Centre in Paris, built in collaboration with English architect Richard Rogers in the 1970s, and the New York Times Building that opened in New York last year.
He also collaborated on the redesign of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.
Piano received the Pritzker award, widely viewed as architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, at a special ceremony at the White House in 1998 during which he was likened to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
This year he has received a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles Italian Cultural Institute, which recognises Italian excellence in the world, as well as the 2008 Sonning Prize, Denmark's biennial award for contribution to European culture.
