Richard Rogers

Richard Rogers (born July 23, 1933, Florence, Italy—died December 18, 2021, London, England) was an Italian-born British architect noted for what he described as “celebrating the components of the structure.” His high-tech approach is most evident in the Pompidou Centre (1971–77) in Paris, which he designed with the Italian architect Renzo Piano.

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Rogers studied at the Architectural Association in London (1954–59) and Yale University (1961–62). He returned to London to open a partnership with his then wife, Su Brumwell, along with another married couple, Wendy Cheesman and Norman Foster, in a firm called Team 4 (1963–66). From 1970 to 1977 he practiced with Renzo Piano, and together they planned the landmark Pompidou Centre. This exposed-steel structure was a tour de force of high-tech design, with a dramatic skeletal exterior clad with tube-encased elevators and brightly coloured ductwork. In 1977 Rogers created the Richard Rogers Partnership, a firm featuring some of the designers who worked on the Pompidou Centre. He gained more international attention for his spectacular Lloyds of London skyscraper (1978–86), a highly polished mechanistic tower in which a rectangular core surrounds a central atrium. The rectangular component is in turn surrounded by towers containing elements such as restrooms, elevators, and kitchens, which allow easy access for repairs or for making any future modernizations of the building’s service functions.

The Pompidou and Lloyds commissions gained Rogers worldwide attention and led to other commissions, including the European Court of Human Rights (1989–95) in Strasbourg, France; the Channel 4 Television Headquarters (1991–94) in London; 88 Wood Street (1994–99), an office development in London; and the Daimler Chrysler building (1993–99) in the revitalized Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. Rogers’s work reached its greatest audience when he designed the Millennium Dome (1996–99; later the O2 Arena) in Greenwich, England. This massive polytetrafluoroethylene-roofed structure housed a variety of exhibition pavilions that were individually executed by noted British designers. While the dome received a great deal of negative press because of low attendance numbers and problems with financial planning, the structure itself was a striking and quickly built solution to the challenge of constructing an enormous world’s-fair-like enterprise under one roof. Among Rogers’s later works is Terminal 4 (2005) at Madrid Barajas International Airport; the structure, which earned the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize in 2006, features an undulating roof and is noted for its use of light.

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In 2007 the name of Rogers’s firm was changed to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Subsequent projects included Maggie’s West London Centre (2008); Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport (2008), London; One Hyde Park (2011), London; the Leadenhall Building (2014; called the “Cheese Grater”), London; International Towers Sydney (2016); and 3 World Trade Center (2018), New York. Rogers retired from his firm in 2020.

Rogers received a number of other awards, including the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture in 2000 and the Pritzker Prize in 2007. In 1995 he became the first architect to deliver the annual BBC Reith Lectures, a series of radio talks; these were later published as Cities for a Small Planet (1997). Rogers was knighted in 1991 and was made a life peer in 1996. In 2008 he was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.