Sir Richard Rogers(1933–2021)

Richard George Rogers was born at the small private clinic at Florence on 23 July 1933, the only child of William Nino Rogers, an Anglo-Italian doctor of mixed English and Trieste-Jewish-Italian descent, and Dada Geiringer, a Trieste-born Anglo-Italian potter. The family carried both English and Italian passports across the parents' two backgrounds: the father had been born at Trieste, schooled at the Florence English-language school, and qualified MD at Florence in 1928 before establishing a medical practice for the substantial Florentine Anglo-expatriate community of the 1930s. The mother was a ceramic artist trained at the Florence Art-and-Design Academy of the period. The boy was schooled at the Italian-and-English-bilingual Anglican school at Florence through his earliest years and was, by family arrangement, raised in continuous Italian and English fluency from infancy.

The family moved to England in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War on the Italian-Fascist anti-Semitic discrimination policies that had been introduced under Mussolini in 1938. The Rogers family was on the southern train across the Italian frontier into Switzerland on 14 May 1939 and to London on 23 May 1939 with a substantial portion of their Florence household goods packed in two trunks. He was sent to St John's preparatory school at Pinner in suburban Middlesex from six and then to Epsom College in Surrey from thirteen. He was, by his own subsequent account in the 2017 *A Place for All People* memoir, severely dyslexic at school and bullied for the remaining Italian accent he carried across the war years; the dyslexia diagnosis was confirmed in retrospect in the 1990s, though no contemporary teacher had given the Epsom boy any working diagnosis of the learning difficulty he had.

He took the Architectural Association School of Architecture entrance examination in 1954 at twenty-one (after national service in the Italian-language British Army Intelligence Corps at Trieste, 1951 to 1953), studied at the AA from 1954 to 1959, and went on to the Yale School of Architecture for the Master's degree from 1961 to 1962 on the Fulbright Scholarship. Yale was where he met Norman Foster, then a post-Manchester-and-pre-Yale student of his own generation. The two of them, alongside Su Brumwell (Rogers's then-fiancée and later first wife) and Wendy Cheesman (Foster's then-fiancée and later first wife), formed the four-person partnership Team 4 on their return to London in 1963 to take their first commercial commissions. Team 4 ran for four years and produced the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon (1965) and the Creek Vean house at Pill, Cornwall (1966) before dissolving in 1967 over the irreconcilable differences in working method that the Foster-Rogers four-person partnership produced.

The Pompidou Centre commission, won jointly with Renzo Piano on the open international competition of 1971 against six hundred and eighty competing entries, was the foundational commission of the Rogers career. The competition design (the inside-out building with the services on the outside and the open plan on the inside, the structural-steel-and-coloured-pipe exterior aesthetic that became the foundational visual signature of the early high-tech architectural movement) was the most-radical entry of the competition and won unanimously on the French government's jury of December 1971. The building was constructed at Beaubourg, Paris between 1972 and 1977 at a final cost of about a hundred and thirty million dollars and opened to the public on 31 January 1977. It is, by the consensus of the modern architectural-critical history, one of the two or three foundational buildings of the late-twentieth-century European architectural movement.

The major buildings of the next four decades carried the same high-tech-and-inside-out vocabulary across an unbroken senior commercial-and-civic commission record: Lloyd's of London (1978-1986), Channel 4 Television Headquarters London (1990-94), the Millennium Dome at Greenwich (1996-99), Heathrow Terminal 5 (1989-2008), Madrid Barajas Terminal 4 (1997-2005), the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg (1989-95), Bordeaux Law Courts (1992-98), and the Senedd Welsh Assembly building at Cardiff Bay (2001-06). He was knighted in 1991, made a life peer as Baron Rogers of Riverside in 1996, and awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2007 at seventy-three. He served as Labour-appointed Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism to the Mayor of London 2001-2008 under Ken Livingstone, was active in the post-2010 cycle in opposition to the Conservative-Liberal coalition's planning-reform programme, and continued working at the Rogers Stirk Harbour Architects practice (the post-2007 reorganisation of the firm) through the partnership with Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour. He died at his home in Chelsea on 18 December 2021, eighty-eight years old. The Rogers name in the English-side catalogue is the patronymic of Roger (the Norman name of the Conquest, Old French Rogier, ultimately the Frankish *Hruodgari*); he carried the Florence-born Anglo-Italian variant of it into the late-twentieth-century European architectural canon alongside his AA-and-Yale partner Norman Foster of the Foster catalogue.