Richard Rogers
A British architect who made structure and services the spectacle, turning the insides of buildings outward and redefining what a public building could look like.
Richard Rogers believed that buildings should not hide their workings. The Centre Pompidou in Paris — its structural frame, escalators, and colour-coded ducts all relocated to the exterior — announced this conviction to the world in 1977, and Rogers spent the following four decades extending it across airports, law courts, courthouses, and city masterplans.
Formation in Florence and London
Rogers was born in Florence on 23 July 1933, the son of an English doctor and an Italian mother; his family moved to England in 1938, and he grew up in London. Diagnosed with dyslexia, he struggled in conventional schooling but found his way to the Architectural Association in London and later to Yale, where he met Norman Foster. Together with their partners Su Rogers and Wendy Foster, they formed Team 4, a short-lived but influential studio that produced the Reliance Controls building in Swindon (1967) — a pioneering example of steel industrial building applied to commercial architecture.
After Team 4 dissolved, Rogers formed a partnership with the Italian architect Renzo Piano.
Centre Pompidou
The competition-winning Centre Pompidou (Centre Beaubourg) in Paris, designed with Renzo Piano and completed in 1977, is one of the most visited buildings in Europe. Its defining move was to place all structural and mechanical systems — the exoskeleton of steel trusses, the escalators in transparent tubes, the colour-coded service runs — on the exterior, freeing the interior floors as large, flexible, column-free spaces. The building was widely denounced at its opening as an oil refinery in the middle of Paris; it became a cultural institution that draws more visitors annually than the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower.
Lloyd's Building and the high-tech movement
Rogers's Lloyd's of London building (1986) applied the same logic to a financial institution in the City of London: six service towers — containing lifts, staircases, and toilets — surrounding a central atrium. The stainless-steel exterior, with its visible pipework and external glass lifts, drew both condemnation and admiration. With Foster's buildings of the same period, it defined what critics called high-tech architecture — a British strain of modernism that aestheticised engineering.
Cities should be built for people, not for cars or commerce — that principle has to be fought for in every generation.
