Architect Richard Rogers altered skylines of Paris and London

NEW YORK • Richard Rogers, a Pritzker Prize-winning British architect whose colourful modernism forever altered the cityscapes of Paris and London, died last Saturday at his home in London. He was 88.

His son, Roo Rogers, confirmed the death. No cause was given.

With his striking designs for the tubular Pompidou Centre in Paris; the vast Millennium Dome in London, which seemed to hover like an alien spaceship; and the brash Lloyd's of London building, with its soaring atrium, Rogers turned architecture not just inside out but also on its head.

When he was awarded the Pritzker, architecture's highest honour, in 2007, the jury cited his "unique interpretation of the modern movement's fascination with the building as machine" and said he had "revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city".

He did have his critics, however, particularly early on.

One rainy day in 1977, the Italian-born Rogers was standing on a street in Paris admiring the soon-to-open Pompidou Centre - then a beleaguered, much pilloried, radical-looking structure he had designed with his friend Italian architect Renzo Piano - when an elegantly dressed woman offered him shelter under her umbrella. She asked if he knew who had designed the building. When he announced proudly, "Madame, it was me!" he recalled in his 2017 memoir, A Place For All People, she whacked him on the head with the umbrella and marched off.

Six years earlier, Rogers and Piano had entered a competition to design that cultural centre. They called their design, with its transparent steel carapace, tubular escalators and exposed systems painted in primary colours, "a place for all people".

Yet the whole endeavour seemed doomed from the start: Their submission was initially returned because of insufficient postage. After they won the competition, there was constant, vitriolic opposition to their funky, gutsy design, deplored by many as a desecration of the Paris skyline.

When the Pompidou Centre finally opened in January 1977, reviews were mixed but the public loved it and people lined up by the hundreds each day. Seven million visited that year, more than the visitors to the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower combined.

Writing in The New York Times, art critic Hilton Kramer called the building "one of the most breathtaking architectural accomplishments of recent times".

Richard George Rogers was born on July 23, 1933, in Florence, Italy. He was the grandson of an English dentist. His father, Nino, was a doctor and an Anglophile; his mother, Dada, was the daughter of an architect and an engineer. The family fled fascist Italy in 1939 and moved to England with war coming to Europe.

His father worked in a tuberculosis clinic and his mother worked with him. When she fell ill with the disease and went to recuperate in the Alps, Rogers, age six, was sent to boarding school.

Dyslexic and foreign to his schoolmates, he was bullied and beaten. "People have asked me whether dyslexia makes you a better architect," Rogers wrote in his memoir. "I'm not sure whether that's true, but it does rule out some careers, so it focuses you on what you can do."

Adrift after school, he joined the British army and served two years in Trieste, Italy, during which he spent time with a cousin, Ernesto Rogers, a celebrated architect and urbanist, and worked in his Milan office.

Ernesto Rogers' work - the civic promise of modernism and his own warm version of it - inspired Richard Rogers to join the profession. After a year of art school, he enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, at the time the only such school in Britain.

In his third year, he met sociology student Su Brumwell and they married in 1960. The couple both attended Yale University and met Norman Foster, a fellow student.

Richard Rogers later formed an architectural practice with Foster and two architect sisters, Wendy and Georgie Cheeseman. They built houses for all their parents, inspired by the Case Study houses, prototypes for economic housing, that the couple had seen in Los Angeles on a road trip.

These houses, in turn, inspired the work that followed, igniting in Rogers an enthusiasm for the efficiencies of technology, modular construction and a commitment to the more humane side of architecture.

The members of the practice soon went their separate ways. Through an introduction by his doctor, Rogers met Piano, and with Su Rogers and others, they established a firm just before the Paris competition. Decades later, Richard Rogers, Foster and Piano would be among the most successful and well-known modernist architects in the world - Les Starchitects, as the French called them.

Richard Rogers and his wife parted ways when, in the early 1970s, he fell in love with Ruth Elias, an American book designer and later a chef. They married in 1973. A year after the Pompidou opened, Rogers and Piano, too, parted ways professionally, although they remained friends.

"Richard has always been four steps ahead of me in everything," Piano said in an interview for this obituary last year. "From the beginning, he was preaching about architecture as the art of making a better world. He has a kind of civic strength."

Rogers was a champion of sustainability - his National Assembly Building in Cardiff, Wales, which looks like a buoyant, redwood spaceship, halved the Welsh Parliament's energy use. He advocated for compact developments and affordable, equitable housing as well as for car-free cities.

Rogers' populism extended to his practice. At Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, a London-based firm with a staff of 160, each employee shares in the firm's profits, a percentage of which is donated to charity.

"I don't believe in the ownership of work," he told The New York Times. He retired last year.

His legacy is his buildings, of course, but also "the idea that modernism doesn't have to be cold, or to deny us sensual pleasures", critic Paul Goldberger said.

"He loved colour and he wanted his buildings to inspire an emotional connection. And most important of all, he wanted urbanism to be a positive force; he worked all his life to make cities civilising places, not just collections of disconnected buildings."

In addition to his son Roo, Rogers is survived by his wife; three other sons, Ben, Zad and Ab; a brother, Peter; and 13 grandchildren. His son Bo died in 2011 at 27.

NYTIMES