Richard Rogers
Rogers designed the Centre Pompidou with Renzo Piano and then the Lloyd’s building in London, with its staircases, lifts and pipes on the outside. He was also committed to urban planning and the dense, lively city.
Richard Rogers was born in 1933 in Florence into an Anglo-Italian family and moved to England as a child in 1939. He was dyslexic and struggled at school but studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and then at Yale in the United States, where he met Norman Foster. Back in England they founded the practice Team 4 in 1963 with Su Rogers and Wendy Foster. Among other things Team 4 designed a factory for Reliance Controls in Swindon, whose lightweight steel structure and flexible spaces pointed towards what later became known as high-tech. After Team 4 broke up in 1967 he set up his own practice and then worked with Renzo Piano.
In 1971 Rogers and Piano won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a cultural centre where the steel structure, escalators and colour-coded pipes for water, electricity and ventilation were placed on the outside to leave free, flexible spaces inside. The building opened in 1977. The Lloyd’s building in London, 1978–1986, developed the idea with staircases, lifts and toilets in towers outside a glazed core. He later designed the Millennium Dome in London, Terminal 4 at Madrid’s Barajas Airport with its undulating bamboo ceiling, and the Welsh Parliament in Cardiff. His architecture is based on flexibility, openness, visible technology and light, and from 2007 his practice was called Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.
Rogers was strongly committed to urban planning and environmental issues and argued for the dense, mixed and lively city with good public transport. He chaired the British government’s Urban Task Force around the turn of the millennium and advised the Mayor of London. He was knighted and in 1996 became a life peer in the House of Lords as Lord Rogers of Riverside. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2007 and died in 2021. The Centre Pompidou and Lloyd’s are among the finest works of high-tech architecture and influenced architects all over the world. His ideas about the compact, sustainable city have also had an impact on Nordic urban planning, where densification and mixed-use development have been watchwords in major urban projects since the 1990s.