English, but born in Florence, he was 88 years old. Pritzker Prize and master of high-tech, among his works also the Human Rights Building in Strasbourg
the gift that matters, not when it arrives. A few words had been enough for the architect Richard Rogers, passed away at 88, to cancel any possible controversy about that Pritzker Prize (the Nobel Prize of architecture) awarded to him in March 2017, but which basically came only nine years after the one already awarded to Renzo Piano, designer with Rogers, of one of the buildings that have literally changed the history of architecture, the Center Pompidou in Paris (universally known as Beaubourg).
When in September 2020 Rogers resigned from the studio he had founded in London in 1977, his was the farewell step of one of the most innovative and visionary designers of his generation (that of the boys of 1933), an architect who has never stopped believing in the revolutionary side of his profession (although he could boast of the aristocratic title of Baron of Riverside as well as of a knighthood and a lordship).
Impossible to think of something different, because architecture cannot be just a question of high technology and great creativity, he wrote in his autobiography (A place for everyone, published in 2018 by Johan & Levi). I prefer to imagine it as a discipline in which, in addition to technology and creativity logically, also politics, social issues, economic and racial differences. Because, according to Rogers, this is the only way to talk about democracy and because one cannot think of architecture without thinking of people.
The Lloyd’s headquarters and the Millennium Dome in London, the Inmos factory in Newport, the Minami Yamashiro School in Tokyo, the Human Rights Building in Strasbourg, the offices of Daimler Benz in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, the Museum of art in Doha, the new Terminal of Madrid Barajas airport: these are some of the works of the architect who loved Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Donatello, Frank Lloyd Wright and who had been one of the most listened to advisors of the mayor of London Ken Livingstone (Red Ken , Ken the Red) in the fields of architecture and urban planning. For him, beauty was very important. Especially for him, English, born in Florence (by chance, on 23 July 1933), from a cultured and cosmopolitan family; his father Nino a doctor who grew up in Venice and his mother Dada, from Trieste, a passionate lover of art, a pupil of James Joyce who had taught her English.
How much these Made in Italy roots had meant for Rogers, which he had had to abandon in 1938, with the war just around the corner and with the racial laws already enacted, leaving the Florentine apartment with a view of Brunelleschi’s dome – and with the furnishings designed by his cousin Ernesto Nathan Rogers – for a room in a boarding house in Bayswater, with the coin counter for heating and the tub in a closet? A great many replied each time by showing off his always very fluent Italian. Rogers had always rejected the personalistic vision of the profession with great determination: In my London studio we are more than 200, each one has its own role, there is no one who is superfluous, good architecture comes from teamwork, at least if you want to do well; this is why there are no walls in my studio; after all, mine is more a square than a studio.
On the other hand, he was thinking about a square, or rather the Piazza del Campo in Siena, while he was designing the Pompidou. Hence an idea of democratic architecture (If you are in a beautiful place, the spirit is better too: architecture, quality of life for all) was the one pursued by Rogers who, with a touch of very British snobbery, exhibited his great passion for adventure (as of opera) who, as a young man, had made him run with the bulls in Pamplona, who had dodged the controllers by clinging to him outside the wagons and made him spend a night in the cells of San Sebastin after being arrested by the Franco Civil Guard for swimming naked in the sea – as he had told in his autobiography.
One of the most important exponents of high-tech, inventor of the new expressionism in architecture, convinced advocate of the potential that the city can have in social changes. This is how you can choose to define Lord Richard Rogers (of Riverside): but to summarize the secret of his career, which began working in the Bbpr studio (with Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti and Gian Luigi Banfi and precisely with his uncle Nathan), Rogers he preferred to speak of the study of social phenomena, of research on environmental technologies, the use of flexible structural and energy solutions (for this reason materials, including ceramics, are important). Always pursuing the dream of an architecture for all, civil and democratic: Ours, even that of architects, is a citizen’s destiny.
December 19, 2021 (change December 20, 2021 | 08:20)
© Time.News