persons
High-tech architect Lord Richard Rogers has died
Richard Rogers stands in front of a wooden model of his vision of London’s Southbank in 2013. The British star architect died at the age of 88. Photo: Nick Ansell / Press Association / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The Center Pompidou in Paris made Richard Rogers and his distinctive style known around the world in the 1970s. The Pritzker Prize winner died on Saturday at the age of 88.
For him technology was the raw material of architecture, like words for poetry. Richard Rogers died on Saturday evening at the age of 88 in his home in London, as various media reported, citing the family and his spokesman.
The cause of death was not disclosed. The innovative star architect left behind his second wife Ruth and four sons. He was raised to the nobility by the Queen, but Richard Rogers was born in Florence: “I come from a pretty spoiled upper-class family,” he told the Guardian. The father was a dentist – “he always dreamed of England” – the mother an art lover. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the family moved to London. A descent, but Richard and his younger brother enjoyed the exciting time even though he didn’t even finish school. “I was really backward,” explained Rogers. “Back then, dyslexia was not recognized and I was called stupid.” He learned to box in order to defend himself against it.
Because of his language skills, he was transferred to Italy for military service and worked in his cousin’s architectural office on his days off. He then persuaded the British Architectural Association to let him take their diploma course in London, even though he did not have a high school diploma. From there it went up.
“A Place For All People”
In London he fell in love with the architecture student Su Brumwell, his future wife. They studied with the future star architect Norman Foster at Yale and in 1963 founded the so-called Team 4 with him and his girlfriend Wendy Cheesman – a breeding ground for the British high-tech movement, whose best-known representatives include Foster and Rogers. In his autobiographical book “A Place For All People” he described how they first set up their office in Wendy’s bedroom: “When customers came, friends were used to pose as architects to make Team 4 look like a bigger company.”
He and Foster saw each other as both modernists and functionalists. They were inspired by the early industrial buildings in northern England, as well as the poetry of iron, steel and glass by railroad pioneer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and greenhouse architect Joseph Paxton. At the same time, the housing shortage at the time called for cheap, prefabricated houses that could be composed of simple elements and changed over and over again according to the needs of the residents.
Richard and Sue Rogers used these criteria to design a house for his parents. His mother loved its beauty and color. His father, however, considered complaining. Today it is a listed building; Rogers donated it to Harvard University for Design Fellows.
Luminous colors and structural elements
At that time, Richard Rogers developed his recognizable, but also adaptable style, with bright colors and structural elements that turn the building infrastructure outside. This is also the case with his most famous building, the Center Pompidou Palace of Culture in Paris, which he designed together with the Italian Renzo Piano: The skeleton envelops the building and uses the entire supply system as an artistic element with the advantage that the interior can be used to the maximum without interruption . A radical idea, and it took some time before the building was accepted not only as a design icon but also by the Parisians.
“Young architects are incredibly naive,” said Richard Rogers, recalling this time in the Guardian. “I would never dream of doing it now. We had a great client, but the press got all hell out of us. There have only been two positive articles in seven years. I don’t know how we got to the end. ” When an elderly lady found out he was one of the architects, she hit him on the head with an umbrella.
At the end of the 1960s, Rogers fell in love with the art student Ruth Elias; they married in 1973 while the Center Pompidou was being built. From this marriage there are two sons – in addition to the three from the first marriage – one of whom died in 2011. “You cannot recover from the death of a child,” wrote Rogers in “A Place For All People.”
Three World Trade Centers in Manhattan
After his worldwide breakthrough in the 1970s, he designed the headquarters for the insurance market Lloyd’s of London on the same principle; It was followed by such memorable buildings as the Millennium Dome, Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport and the Leadenhall Building in the financial district, affectionately known by Londoners as the “Cheesegrater”.
Shortly before his 85th birthday, he completed the construction of the Three World Trade Center in Manhattan, one of the tallest buildings in New York City at 329 meters. It is a typical Richard Rogers structure: an external strut system made of reflective glass and stainless steel holds the skyscraper together – a construction similar to the glass palaces behind the Tate Modern in London. The American Institute for Architects therefore awarded him the highest architecture award in the United States, the AIA gold medal.