Richard Rogers

Origins and early life

Richard Rogers was born in Florence on 23 July 1933 into an Anglo-Italian family whose paternal line was Jewish: his father, William Nino Rogers, came from a Jewish family that had moved from Sunderland in England to Venice around 1800, and he was a cousin of the Italian Jewish architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers.

Work and career

In 1938 and 1939, after Mussolini's racial laws stripped Italian Jews of their rights, the family left Italy for England, and the Italian architecture magazine Domus later wrote plainly that Rogers's British career was itself a result of those laws. He was severely dyslexic and unhappy at school, discovered architecture at the Architectural Association in London, and studied at Yale, where he met Norman Foster. With Renzo Piano he won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, completed in 1977, a building that turned its structure, ducts and escalators to the outside and gave the whole of its ground to a public square.

He repeated the idea in the City of London with the Lloyd's Building of 1986, and his practice went on to design the Millennium Dome, Madrid-Barajas Terminal 4 and the Leadenhall Building. Rogers was made a life peer as Lord Rogers of Riverside in 1996, advised London and Barcelona on urban policy, and argued for compact, walkable cities against suburban sprawl. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2007 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1985, and he died in London on 18 December 2021.