British architect Richard Rogers, known for designing some of the world’s most famous buildings including Paris’ Pompidou Centre, has died aged 88.
Rogers, who changed the London skyline with distinctive creations such as the Millennium Dome and the ‘Cheesegrater’, “passed away quietly” Saturday night, Freud communications agency’s Matthew Freud told the Press Association.
His son Roo Rogers also confirmed his death to the New York Times, but did not give the cause.
The Italian-born architect won a series of awards for his designs, including the 2007 Pritzker Prize, and is one of the pioneers of the “high-tech” architecture movement, distinguished by structures incorporating industrial materials such as glass and steel.
He is the co-creator of France’s Pompidou Centre – opened in 1977 and famed for its multi-coloured, pipe-covered facade – which he designed with Italian architect Renzo Piano.
Rogers’ other well-known designs include Strasbourg’s European court of human rights and the Three World Trade Center in New York, as well as international airport terminals in Madrid and London’s Heathrow.
Born in Florence in 1933, his father was a doctor, his mother a former pupil of the famed Irish writer James Joyce. The family fled the dictatorship of Mussolini, settling in England in 1938.
London was miserable. The family had been comfortably middle-class in Italy but the relocation had reduced them to a single-room flat that ran on a coin meter for heating.
“Life had switched from colour to black-and-white,” Rogers recalled in his 2017 autobiography “A Place for all People”.
School was no easier either. Rogers was dyslexic at a time when there was no diagnosis for the condition and he was “called stupid”, he told the Guardian in 2017.
He was miserable, he said in his autobiography, “crying myself to sleep every night – years of unhappiness”.
He left school in 1951 with no qualifications but managed to gain entry into London’s Architectural Association School, known for its modernism.
He completed his architecture studies at Yale in the United States in 1962, where he met fellow British architect Norman Foster.
Although buildings were Rogers’ world, he insisted it was the space around them that was key in defining those that worked.
“The two can’t be judged apart,” he told the Guardian in 2017.
“The Twin Towers in New York, for instance. They weren’t great buildings, but the space between them was.”