Richard Rogers: The famous architect behind Pompidour has died at the age of 88 News

British architect Richard Rogers, best known for designing some of the world’s most famous buildings including the Pompidou Center in Paris, has died at the age of 88, according to media reports.

Rogers, who changed the sky in London with distinctive creations like the Millennium Dome and “Cheesegrater,” “died in silence” on Saturday night, Freud told the Matthew Freud Press Association.

Her son Roo Rogers also confirmed the death to the New York Times, but gave no reason.

The Italian-born architect has won several awards for his designs, including the 2007 Pritzker Prize for Architecture, and is one of the pioneers of the “high-tech” architectural movement, distinguished by structures that include industrial materials such as glass and steel.

He is the founder of the French Pompidou Center, which opened in 1977 and is famous for its multi-colored, plaster-covered façade, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano.

Other well-known designs by Rogers include the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the 3 World Trade Center in New York, as well as the terminals at Madrid International Airport and the London Heathrow Terminals.

Slow start

Born in Florence in 1933, his father was a doctor, his mother a former student of the famous Irish writer James Joyce. The family escaped the Mussolini dictatorship and settled in England in 1938.

London was miserable. The family was comfortable in the middle class in Italy, but the relocation was reduced to a one-room flat on a coin-operated heating counter.

“Life went from color to black and white,” Rogers recalled in his 2017 autobiography “A Place for All People”.

School wasn’t even easier. Rogers was dyslexic “at a time when there was no diagnosis for a condition called stupidity,” he told the Guardian newspaper in 2017.

He was miserable, he said in his autobiography, “to sleep in tears every night – unfortunate years.”

‘Notre Dame of the Pipes’

He left school without a degree in 1951 and, after his national army service, was admitted to the London Architectural Association School, known for its modernism.

He completed his architectural studies at the Yale in the United States in 1962, and met the British Norman Foster.

They returned to England in 1964 and co-founded the architecture company Team 4, which became known for its technology-inspired designs.

In 1968, Rogers met the Italian architect Renzo Piano, with whom he shared an interest in developing flexible and anti-monumental architecture.

“He’s my closest friend, almost my brother,” Rogers said of an interview with The Guardian about Piano – London’s Shard Tower designer. “We were bad guys.”

In the same year they met, they won a competition to design a new art gallery in Paris, which became the Pompidou Center.

Today, the city’s landmark, its façade is covered with thickly painted pipes, and the exterior of the building has stairs and escalators.

He quickly attracted nicknames, not all of them complementary: “Gasworks,” “The Pompidolium,” “Notre-Dame of the Pipes.”

Other well-known designs by Rogers are the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg [File: Frederick Florin/AFP]

It’s all about space

Rogers placed about 400 commissions on a route that defined large buildings and horizons characterized by lightweight structures, prefabricated materials, and the use of cutting-edge technology.

He designed the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the Potsdamer Platz office in Berlin, a terminal at Madrid airport and the 3 World Trade Center in New York.

Behind the wide white marquee in London was the yellow crane support known as the Millennium Dome and then the 02 Center, a popular venue for pop concerts and events for tennis competitions.

The “Cheesegrater”, 225 meters high (738 feet) is known as the Leadenhall office building in central London for its elegant wedge shape, which opened in 2014.

Although the buildings were the world of Rogers, he emphasized that the space around them was the key to defining those who functioned.

“The two can’t be separated,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “The Twin Towers in New York, for example. They weren’t big buildings, but the space between them was. ”

In recognition of his contribution to architecture and urban planning at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London in 2014, his wife Lady Ruth, his sons Ab, Ben, Roo and Zad, his brother Peter and 13 grandchildren remain. .