British architect Richard Rogers, who with Renzo Piano created the Georges Pompidou center in Paris, died Saturday evening, according to media citing a spokesperson and his son. He was one of the pioneers of the “high-tech” movement, which is distinguished by its glass and steel structures and exposed pipes.
The 88-year-old 2007 Pritzker Prize winner Richard Rogers “passed away peacefully,” Matthew Freud, president and founder of communications agency Freuds, told UK news agency PA. According to New York Times, his son Roo Rogers has confirmed his death, the cause of which has not been specified.
“Very moved to learn of the disappearance of Richard Rogers, architect of genius of our building with his accomplice Renzo Piano”, reacted on Twitter the Center Pompidou.
“Immense sadness”, meanwhile tweeted the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, “Richard Rogers was a visionary, an architect, a talented artist, free and inspiring. He loved Paris. To his family, to those close to him, I send my condolences ”.
The American architecture critic Paul Goldberger lamented a “new immense loss for architecture in 2021” and hailed on the social network “a courteous man and a formidable talent”.
Born July 23, 1933 in Florence to a father who was a doctor and a mother who was a former pupil of the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Richard Rogers fled Mussolini and settled in England in 1938. At school, “I was very late,” he confided to the Guardian. “At the time, we did not yet know dyslexia. I was just considered a stupid student ”.
Adventurer and a bit rogue, he served in the British army then miraculously joined the “Architectural Association School” in London, then known for its modernism. He completed his architectural degree at Yale, United States, in 1962. There he met Norman Foster. Upon their return to England in 1964, they and their wives founded “Team 4”, a firm recognized for its architectural designs inspired by technology.
In 1968, he met Renzo Piano, an Italian who shared with him the concern for flexible and anti-monumental architecture. They quickly become friends and “the two bad boys” as they liked to be called, in 1971 won the competition for the new museum of modern art in Paris, the future Center Pompidou. With its maze of piping in primary colors and its large open esplanade, Beaubourg became “Notre Dame de la tuyauterie” when it was inaugurated in 1977.
Critics are fired. “Young architects are immensely naive. At the moment, I could not dream of such an order, ”he explained to the Guardian. “The press made us go through hell: in seven years, we have had only two favorable articles. I don’t know how we ended up ”.
In addition to the Pompidou Center, he designed the headquarters of the Lloyd’s insurance company, an architectural UFO inaugurated in 1986 in the City of London.
He also created the building of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the offices in Berlin on Potsdamer Platz, a terminal at Barajas international airport in Madrid, the “Three World Trade Center” in New York , as well as the “Millennium Dome” in London, curiosity of the festivities of the year 2000 which earned him the wrath of Prince Charles.
Become Lord Rogers of Riverside, the architect sat from 1996 in the House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament, in the ranks of Labor.