Richard Rogers: Pompidou and Millennium Dome engineer dies at 88 | building

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British architect Richard Rogers, known for designing some of the world’s most famous buildings including the Center Pompidou in Paris, has died at the age of 88.

Rogers, who changed the London skyline with iconic creations such as the Millennium Dome and “Cheesegrater,” “passed away quietly” on Saturday night, Matthew Freud of Freud’s communications agency told the press.

His son Roe Rogers also confirmed his death to the New York Times, but did not say why.

The Italian-born architect has won a series of awards for his designs, including the 2007 Pritzker Prize, and is one of the pioneers of the “high-tech” architecture movement, featuring structures that incorporate industrial materials such as glass and steel.

A view of the Millennium Dome in 1999 Photo: DEA/S. Lombardi Vallauri/De Agostini/Getty Images

He is one of the founders of the French Center Pompidou – which opened in 1977 and is best known for its multicolored, piped facade – designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano.

Other well-known Rogers designs include the Strasbourg European Court of Human Rights and the Third World Trade Center in New York, as well as international airport lounges in Madrid and Heathrow in London.

Born in Florence in 1933, his father was a doctor, and his mother was a former student of the famous Irish writer James Joyce. The family fled Mussolini’s dictatorship, and settled in England in 1938.

Center Pompidou in 2007, Photo: Loic Vince/AFP/Getty Images

London was miserable. The family was comfortably middle-class in Italy, but resettlement moved them to a one-room apartment with a coin-operated meter for heating.

“Life has gone from color to black and white,” Rogers recalls in his 2017 autobiography A Place for All People.

School couldn’t be easier either. Rogers had dyslexia at a time when the condition was not diagnosed and was called “stupid,” he told the Guardian in 2017.

He was miserable, he said in his autobiography, “I cry myself to sleep every night—years of misery.”

He left school in 1951 without any qualifications but managed to enter the Architectural Association School of London, known for its modernity.

He completed his architectural studies at Yale University in the United States in 1962, where he met his colleague, the British architect Norman Foster.

European Court of Human Rights, shown here in 2018, Photo: Frédéric Florin/AFP/Getty Images

Although the buildings were Rogers’ world, he insisted that the space around them was key in determining which ones worked.

“The two cannot be judged separately,” he told the Guardian in 2017.

“The Twin Towers in New York, for example. They weren’t great buildings, but the distance between them was.”

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