Architect whose radically innovative buildings included the Pompidou Centre and the Lloyd’s of London building
The Pompidou Centre in Paris, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. Their sci-fi vision for the centre met initially with a frosty reception, but the architects were vindicated by the public reaction.Rogers often credited his urbane, cosmopolitan outlook to his Italian upbringing. He was born in Florence, in an apartment with a view of the Duomo. His father, Nino, was a doctor, whose own father, a dentist, was a British émigré to Italy.
They moved to Britain in 1939 to escape the rise of fascism, finding lodging in a single room in a boarding house in Bayswater with a coin meter for the heating and a bath in a cupboard. Cold, smoggy London at a time of rationing was a culture shock for the young Rogers. As he later recalled, “life switched from colour to black and white”.
It was during these years, Rogers later wrote, that he realised there was more strength in working as a group than being a solo high achiever, an outlook that would go on to inform his collaborative model of practice. Duringat the Royal Academy to mark Rogers’s 80th birthday, the curators admitted that they struggled to find a single drawing by the man himself.
Rogers spent his national service stationed in Trieste, which proved to be a formative period. While on leave, he worked in the office of his cousin Ernesto Rogers, the feted architect of thein Milan, which inspired him to apply to study at the Architectural Association on his return to London. He was an enthusiastic, if inconsistent, student.
The Lloyd’s building in the City of London, ‘a vertical symphony of polished stainless steel’, designed by Richard Rogers, who placed the service cores outside the building, giving a chance to revel in the sculptural forms of staircases, glass lifts and toilet pods on the facade.Rogers met Su Brumwell in his third year.