Richard Rogers obituary: Starchitect behind Pompidou Centre

Born: July 23rd, 1933
Died: December 18th, 2021

Richard Rogers, a Pritzker Prize-winning British architect whose inviting, colourful modernism forever altered the cityscapes of Paris and London, died on Saturday at his home in London. He was 88.

His son, Roo Rogers, confirmed the death. No cause was given.

With his striking designs for the tubular Pompidou Centre in Paris; the vast Millennium Dome in London, which seemed to hover like an alien spaceship; and the brash Lloyd’s of London building, with its soaring atrium, Rogers turned architecture not just inside out but also on its head.

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When he was awarded the Pritzker, architecture’s highest honour, in 2007, the jury cited his “unique interpretation of the modern movement’s fascination with the building as machine” and said he had “revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.”

He did have his critics, however, particularly early on.

One rainy day in 1977, the Italian-born Rogers was standing on a street in Paris admiring the soon-to-open Pompidou Centre – then a beleaguered, much pilloried, radical-looking structure he had designed with his friend Italian architect Renzo Piano – when an elegantly dressed woman offered him shelter under her umbrella. She then asked him if he knew who had designed the building. When he announced proudly, “Madame, it was me!” he recalled in his 2017 memoir, A Place for All People, she whacked him on the head with the umbrella and marched off.

Six years earlier, Rogers and Piano had entered a competition to design that cultural centre, over a grotty parking garage in a red-light district. They called their design, with its transparent steel carapace, tubular escalators and exposed systems painted in primary colours, “a place for all people”. With a street-level piazza and flexible interiors to house a library, an art gallery and a music stage, the building (named after former French president Georges Pompidou) was intended to be a lively forum for public life, rather than a mausoleum of high culture.

Yet the whole endeavour seemed doomed from the start: their submission was initially returned because of insufficient postage. After they won the competition, there was constant, vitriolic opposition to their funky, gutsy design, deplored by many as a desecration of the Paris skyline. The heir of one prominent artist swore that she would rather burn the paintings than have them hung there.

Engulfed in smog

When the Pompidou Centre finally opened, in January 1977, reviews were predictably mixed – “Paris has its own monster,” Le Figaro declared, “just like Loch Ness” – but the public loved it, and people lined up by the hundreds each day. Seven million visited that year, more than attended the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower combined.

Richard George Rogers was born July 23rd, 1933, in Florence, Italy. He was the grandson of an English dentist, which meant he had not just an Anglican surname but also a British passport. His father, Nino, was a doctor and an Anglophile; his mother, Dada, was the daughter of an architect and an engineer. Cultured and politically progressive, the family fled fascist Italy in 1939 and moved to England with war coming to Europe.

At that point Rogers’s world, as he wrote in his memoir, went from colour to black and white: London was engulfed in smog from burning coal. His father worked in a tuberculosis clinic, and his mother worked with him. When she fell ill with the disease and went to recuperate in the Alps, Rogers, aged six, was sent to boarding school.

Dyslexic and foreign to his schoolmates, he was bullied and beaten, and by nine he considered hurling himself from his bedroom window. His learning disability was not widely understood or even recognised in those days; he was, he said, seen as stupid.

“People have asked me whether dyslexia makes you a better architect,” Rogers wrote in his memoir. “I’m not sure whether that’s true, but it does rule out some careers, so it focuses you on what you can do.”

Adrift after school, he joined the British army and served two years in Trieste, Italy, during which he spent time with a cousin, Ernesto Rogers, a celebrated architect and urbanist, and worked in his Milan office. Ernesto Rogers’s work – the civic promise of modernism and his own warm version of it – inspired Richard Rogers to join the profession. After a year of art school, he enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, at the time the only such school in Britain.

Marriage and America

In his third year, he met Su Brumwell, a sociology student whose father was a founder of the Design Research Unit, a British design consultancy; they married in 1960. The couple spent their honeymoon on a kibbutz in Israel, then moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to attend Yale University – Richard Rogers on a Fulbright scholarship to study architecture and Su Rogers to study city planning. There they met Norman Foster, a fellow student, with whom they became fast friends and, later, collaborators.

A road trip to Southern California after graduation introduced Su and Richard Rogers to the bright Mondrian colours of the Case Study houses, prototypes for economical housing designed by modernist architects such as Richard Neutra and Charles and Ray Eames. When they returned to Britain, Richard Rogers formed an architectural practice with Foster and two architect sisters, Wendy and Georgie Cheeseman. They built houses for all their parents, inspired by those the couple had seen in Los Angeles.

These houses in turn inspired the work that followed, igniting in Rogers an enthusiasm for the efficiencies of technology, modular construction and a commitment to the more humane side of architecture.

The members of the practice soon went their separate ways. Through an introduction by his doctor, Rogers met Piano, and with Su Rogers and others, they established a firm just before the Paris competition. Decades later, Richard Rogers, Foster and Piano would be among the most successful and well-known modernist architects in the world – Les Starchitects, as the French called them.

Rogers and his wife also parted ways when, in a coup de foudre in the early 1970s, he fell in love with Ruth Elias, an American book designer and later a chef. They married in 1973. In addition to his son Roo, she survives him, as do three other sons, Ben, Zad and Ab; a brother, Peter; and 13 grandchildren. His son Bo died in 2011 aged 27.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times