Richard Rogers, architect of the Center Pompidou, has died. – Culture

No epoch influenced the modernist Richard Rogers more than the Renaissance. At first glance, this may be surprising for an architect whose “first god”, according to himself, was the American Frank Lloyd Wright, and whose perhaps most famous work, the Paris Center Pompidou, has little to do with the arrangement of columns or Leon Battista Alberti’s building categories .

The connection to the Renaissance, however, is logical from a biographical point of view, because Richard Rogers was born in Florence in 1933. From the window of his house he had a direct view of the Duomo. His mother had an important influence on his taste development, he said later. She not only relieved him of “fear of the new”, but also gave him a sense of straightforward aesthetics through her minimalist pottery.

In 1938 the five-year-old had to leave Italy for Great Britain with his family because of their father’s Jewish origins. Rogers often related how miserable the first years in exile were for him. While it was difficult enough to find one’s way around the English school environment as an Italian child, it was made even more difficult by the fact that he had pronounced reading and spelling difficulties. At the time, this quickly led to the judgment that the child was stupid. Rogers later volunteered as a spokesperson for a dyslexia awareness campaign. Despite this unlucky start, Richard Rogers pursued the goal of becoming an architect, fueled by Britain’s official entry into modernism at the “Festival of Britain” in 1951.

Rogers’ idea: “the Greek forum and the electronic palace of the future”

He got to know Frank Lloyd Wright’s work during a stay at Yale University. There he met his future office partner, Norman Foster. And already in the early projects of the joint office “Team 4” that commitment to the most open room design possible, which characterizes Rogers’ entire work, is evident. The house that Team 4 built for Rogers’ parents at Wimbledon in 1968 is now one of the most architecturally significant London houses of the 20th century. Rooted in classic modernism and optically permeable thanks to the glass front walls, its interior can be designed in a completely flexible manner.

Here, what distinguished all the great designs of the later years was already in place: Both the executed and the Lloyd’s Building in London, completed in 1986, with its case system, which makes individual parts of the building easy to expand or replace, as well as competition entries that have never been implemented, such as the “Tokyo Forum” “. According to Rogers’ draft notes, it should have been “a new kind of place” where people can meet, the Greek forum and the electronic palace of the future.

Richard Rogers once explained that his buildings were constructed and functioned like a clock: “You can see all the components, the mechanics are revealed.” Architects are “scientists and artists at the same time”, their work is an expression of a visible construction process. This also contains the philosophical reference to the Renaissance, because his goal of being an architect, scientist and artist at the same time was close to the Renaissance ideal – and Rogers was always an idealist.

Rogers built this idea in its purest form together with Renzo Piano in 1977: The Center Pompidou in Paris is still the apotheosis of democratized public architecture in Europe today. All elements are united here: The color-coded pipe systems that are relocated to the outside and keep all repair and maintenance work away from the people in the building. The escalator, which is also relocated to the outside and, like the pipes, is also a visual structural element of the facade. The openness and maximum rearrangement of the interior.

The Center Pompidou should, so Rogers said at the time, “be a place for everyone, young and old, poor and rich, people of all religions and nations – a mixture of Times Square and the British Museum”. This dynamic, pulsating, living structure that exhibits its functions is intended to make culture accessible to the masses. Rogers saw such buildings as a consistent manifestation of his social commitment as a whole, be it in the anti-Iraq war demonstrations, his fundamental rejection of Brexit or in an exchange of blows with the royal scourge of everything modern, Prince Charles, who carried out a large Rogers project in Chelsea secret interventions torpedoed.

Open detailed view

Finding the human dimension in the oversized was Richard Rogers’ goal – even in nominal “non-places” like the astonishingly elegant, light-flooded Heathrow Terminal 5. Its architecture was never an end in itself, but a means of realizing the idea of ​​a society, whose people stay in contact with each other. This is above all what Richard Rogers took with him from the Renaissance city of Florence: the open spaces, all the places that offer people a stage, give them the opportunity to exchange ideas. According to Rogers, this forum idea gives cities their right to exist in the first place.

That doesn’t mean that his office, Rogers Stirk Harbor + Partners, completely resisted the tendency towards superlatives. In 2015, for example, the 225-meter-high Leadenhall Building was completed in London. It owes its nickname “Cheese Grater” to a wedge shape that tapers towards the top, which in turn is due to a special feature of London’s urban planning: 13 lines of sight in the British capital are legally protected from any construction. This includes the view from Fleet Street of St Paul’s Cathedral. In order not to jut out from behind the dome, the Leadenhall Building, as seen from Fleet Street, leans out of the picture, as it were. A typical Rogers feature in the densely built-up City of London was the creation of a new green public space: Under the stilts of the raised foyer, employees of the surrounding companies have one of the few opportunities to have their lunch on a planted area in the concrete desert of the banking district.

Rogers observed with concern that the opportunity for direct human exchange dwindled as cities continued to grow. In his highly acclaimed “Reith Lectures” he also warned that it was above all the rampant cities that exacerbated the current environmental crisis. Richard Rogers countered these problems with the concept of an environmentally conscious, socially responsible post-industrial urban culture. “In any civilized human society,” he said, “access to well-designed public space should be a basic human right.” Richard George Rogers, Baron Rogers of Riverside, has now died in London at the age of 88.