Richard Rogers, a British architect whose unorthodox, inside-out designs for the Pompidou Center in Paris and Lloyd’s insurance headquarters in London transfixed the architecture world and helped bring him his field’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, died Dec. 18 at his home in London. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by Vicki Macgregor, the head of communications at Rogers’s London-based firm, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. She did not cite a cause.
With sleek, muscular designs that included the massive Millennium Dome in London, 3 World Trade Center skyscraper in Manhattan and light-filled Terminal 4 at Madrid-Barajas airport in Spain, Rogers helped reshape cityscapes around the world, crafting airy structures of glass and steel that made him a defining architect of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as one of the field’s most polarizing figures.
Traditionalists scoffed at his use of industrial materials, and at designs that were variously likened to an oil derrick, a V-8 engine, an espresso machine and a Meccano construction set. But along with his former partner Norman Foster, he helped define the high-tech architecture movement that emerged in the late 1960s, offering a bold and colorful new direction for architecture in Britain and beyond.
Awarding him the Pritzker in 2007, the prize jury noted that his designs were marked by a “fascination with the building as machine, an interest in architectural clarity and transparency, the integration of public and private spaces, and a commitment to flexible floor plans that respond to the ever-changing demands of users.”
Rogers rose to international prominence when he designed the Pompidou arts center with his friend Renzo Piano, the Italian architect and fellow Pritzker winner. Opening in 1977, after years of debate over its cost and design, the center featured a brightly colored exoskeleton of pipes, ducts and circulation elements – painted blue, green, red, yellow and silver – that made the building’s industrial guts playfully visible from the street.
The result meant that the inside of the Pompidou could be easily altered and transformed, with no supports or bulky interior components blocking the way. New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer described the Pompidou as “one of the most breathtaking architectural accomplishments of recent times,” while other critics were less impressed, with André Fermigier of Le Monde writing that the five-story building was “a kind of architectural King Kong.”
Yet the Pompidou has since been hailed as a landmark in Rogers’s career as well as in the arts scene of the city as a whole, with thousands of visitors flocking to its outdoor plaza, art exhibitions and glass-sheathed escalator, which offers sweeping views of Paris. The Pompidou “revolutionized museums,” the Pritzker jury said, “transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.”
Rogers employed his inside-out approach once again on the Lloyd’s of London building, which was completed in 1986 and featured exposed pipework and modular, stainless-steel bathroom units appended to the exterior.
The result was an extravagant departure from the classical stone architecture that had long dominated London’s central business district, and was seen as an eyesore by critics including Prince Charles, one of England’s most prominent advocates for traditional design. The prince helped quash at least four of Rogers’s projects in central London, according to the New Yorker magazine.
Rogers lashed out, calling the prince’s intervention “an abuse of power” while also arguing that his detractors had missed the point. “I think people have always misunderstood what modern architecture at its best is about,” he told the Times of London in 2009. “It’s about you and me. Our needs. I think our architecture is humanist, is spiritual.”
His buildings were designed around principles of energy efficiency and sustainability; by his account, his firm’s building for the Welsh Parliament in Cardiff, also known as the Senedd, cut the legislative body’s energy consumption in half. He also advocated for the development of dense, walkable cities supported by mass transit, including while serving as an adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in the 1990s and as chairman of a committee that studied the state of English cities.
After winning the Pritzker, he told the New York Times that he liked to celebrate “the components and the structure” of a building, which enabled him to “get rhythm and poetry out of it.” He wanted, he said, to be known for “buildings which are full of light, which are light in weight, which are flexible, which have low energy, which are what we call legible – you can read how the building is put together.”
Richard George Rogers was born into an Anglo-Italian family in Florence on July 23, 1933. His father was a doctor, and his mother was an artist and potter. The family moved to England on the eve of World War II, and Rogers found himself bullied by classmates and floundering in his classes, struggling with dyslexia long before the reading disorder was widely diagnosed or understood.
“I became very depressed,” he recalled in an interview with Yale University. “When I was young, 7 or 8, I remember standing on the windowsill and saying, ‘Should I jump or shouldn’t I jump?’ ” Attending a school for students with special needs “saved my life,” he said.
Rogers was contemplating a career in dentistry when he discovered modernist architecture in 1951, marveling at buildings that were erected along the Thames for the Festival of Britain. His interest in architecture deepened during a two-year stint in the military, when he was stationed in Trieste, Italy, and spent time with one of his cousins, celebrated Italian architect Ernesto Rogers.
Inspired by his time in Italy, Rogers trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Drawing was difficult. “How can we be expected to make an architect out of a man who cannot make two lines meet?” one of his teachers asked, according to a biography by Bryan Appleyard. But he ultimately landed a Fulbright scholarship and arrived in the United States with his wife at the time, designer Su Brumwell.
Rogers studied architecture at Yale, receiving a master’s degree in 1962. His classmates included Foster, with whom he launched his first architectural practice, Team 4, working with Brumwell and Foster’s first wife, Wendy Cheesman. The firm split up in 1967, and Rogers teamed with Piano before starting Richard Rogers Partnership in 1977, which was later renamed to honor partners Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour.
The firm designed London office towers such as the Leadenhall Building, also known as the Cheesegrater because of its wedge-shaped design, as well as smaller projects including the London branch of Maggie’s Center, which provides care and support for cancer patients.
Rogers worked less frequently in the United States, although he and his firm occasionally designed buildings in Washington, including a new home for the International Spy Museum at L’Enfant Plaza. “The building suggests some kind of space ship or top-secret communications hub – windowless, alien and slightly forbidding,” Washington Post art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott wrote in 2019.
In addition to the Pritzker, Rogers received the Thomas Jefferson Medal and a Gold Medal from both the Royal Institute of British Architects and the American Institute of Architects. He was awarded France’s Legion of Honor in 1986, knighted in 1991 and named a life peer, Baron Rogers of Riverside, five years later.
His marriage to Brumwell ended in divorce. In 1973, he married Ruth Elias, a chef who owns the River Café, a storied London restaurant on the north bank of the Thames. In addition to his wife, survivors include three sons from his first marriage, Ben, Zad and Ab; a son from his second, Roo; a brother; and 13 grandchildren. His youngest son, Bo, died in 2011.
Although Rogers was the face of his firm, lionized alongside “starchitects” such as Foster and Piano, he insisted that architecture was collaborative, noting that his firm had scores of employees, each of whom shared in the company’s profits. “You are leading a team,” he once told the New York Times. “I’ve never really understood how architects can think of themselves as an individual.”
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