1933-2021

The son of an Anglo-Italian father who returned to England during World War II, and a relative of architect and critic Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Richard Rogers died on 18 December in London at 88. Though born and raised in Florence, Rogers would settle for good in London, graduating at the Architectural Association School of Architecture before moving on to work with his cousin Ernesto in Milan and completing a master’s at Yale, where he met his friend and rival: Norman Foster. With him and their respective partners he founded Team 4, the starting point of a long career during which Rogers stayed faithful to the formal findings of high-tech, in his case materialized in the vital, sophisticated, and colorist architecture of his best buildings, from the extraordinary Centre Pompidou designed with Renzo Piano in the early 1980s to the emblematic Lloyd’s in the City of London, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg or, in Spain, the excellent T4 of Barajas Airport. In 2020, Rogers – Pritzker laureate of 2007 – retired from practice after consolidating one of the most important international studios: Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners.