Richard Rogers was born in 1933 in Florence in a cultured and cosmopolitan family: his father Nino is a doctor who grew up in Venice and his mother Dada, from Trieste, an art lover, a student of James Joyce who taught her English.



In 1938, with the war on its doorstep, the family moved to England and abandoned the Florentine apartment with its elegant furnishings - designed by cousin Ernesto Nathan Rogers - and the view of Brunelleschi's dome for a room in a guesthouse in Bayswater, with the coin counter for heating and the tub inside a closet. There is rationing and London is cold and gray, surrounded by the smoke of thousands of coal stoves. And so life goes to black and white: fortunately, the mother dresses in bright colors, which will remain etched forever in memory.



One of the most innovative and visionary architects of his generation, Richard Rogers traces his life and career, from the Center Pompidou in Paris to Lloyd's Building in London, from the project of the Palace of Justice in Bordeaux to the expansion of the Marseille airport. And it offers us a vision of how our cities could be more creative, beautiful and sustainable too.
One of the top innovative and visionary architects of his generation, Richard Rogers traces his life and career, from the Center Pompidou in Paris to Lloyd's Building in London, from the project of the Palace of Justice in Bordeaux to the expansion of the Marseille airport. And offers a vision of how our cities could be more creative, beautiful and sustainable.

Florence
Richard Rogers was born in 1933 in Florence in a cultured and cosmopolitan family: his father Nino is a doctor who grew up in Venice and his mother Dada, from Trieste, an art lover, a student of James Joyce who taught her English. In 1938, with the war on its doorstep, the family moved to England and abandoned the Florentine apartment with its elegant furnishings - designed by cousin Ernesto Nathan Rogers - and the view of Brunelleschi's dome for a room in a guesthouse in Bayswater, with the coin counter for heating and the tub inside a closet. There is rationing and London is cold and gray, surrounded by the smoke of thousands of coal stoves. And so life goes to black and white: fortunately, the mother dresses in bright colors, which will remain etched forever in memory. At the age of seventeen, Rogers started traveling alone. "I was quite adventurous," he writes. "I ran along with the bulls in Pamplona, ​​I dodged the controllers clinging me out of the cars and I spent a night in the cells of San Sebastián after being arrested by Franco's Guardia Civil for swimming naked in the sea." Completed college and without any idea on his future, Rogers enlisted in the army for military service and thanks to his knowledge of Italian he was transferred to Trieste, at the time under British and American military control. Grandfather Riccardo, manager of Assicurazioni Generali, gives him a subscription to the opera house - inaugurating a passion for the opera that still lasts - and on weekends Rogers can visit his family at Villa Geiringer. But staying in Trieste also means seeing Ernesto Nathan Rogers much more often and starting to work in his bbpr studio in Milan during a few licenses, with modest assignments. Fresh out of the Architectural Association School in London, Rogers flies to the United States to complete his training at Yale.

The meeting with Norman Foster
It is here that he meets Norman Foster with whom he will give life - together with his first wife Su and Wendy Foster - to Team 4, to whom he owes the Reliance Control Factory project to Swindon, a factory inspired by the "lightness" typical of American steel constructions , paradigmatic of the emerging high-tech strand. Yale opens the door to new influences, both inside that incubator that was the Arts Building, temporary home of the architecture school and Paul Rudolph's brutalist masterpiece, both outside. While touring the United States and Mexico, Rogers participates in the lectures of Louis Kahn, who speaks with lyrical inspiration of the nature of the materials and the respect that architects owed him, of the relationship between architecture and music, between space and silence; studies the horizontal lines and the organic structure of the buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; contemplates the open architecture of the Eames House in Los Angeles; is influenced by the design sensitivity of Rudolph Schindler and Raphael Soriano. "I had seen the bright colors of California and the Case Study Houses; I had seen how color was used in industrial architecture: to indicate its use, to distinguish the elements or to signal the dangers. "It is the beginning of a long career dedicated to the study of social phenomena, to research on environmental technologies, to 'use of flexible structural and energy solutions, which allow both the replacement of individual elements and the change in use of buildings, in continuity with some principles of Modernism.

Scientist and artist
Rogers claims that the best projects are not simply born from the client's requests, but from a team that tries to respond to wider cultural issues: the Center Pompidou realized with Renzo Piano, one of the most iconic works of contemporary museum history, is a a large cultural container open to the city, a place for everyone, young and old, poor and rich, of every religion and nationality, a cross between the vitality of Times Square and the cultural richness of the British Museum. Lloyd's Building is a machine designed to host financial operations, but also a precise one.



Partly memoir and partly manifest, the book embraces a long creative existence, integrating the story of Rogers' greatest projects, battles against public officials, politicians and even against Prince Charles with the memory of people, places and moments that have influenced his way of being and thinking, and includes a rich iconographic apparatus with three hundred drawings, color photographs and case studies.
Written with Richard Brown, research director at The Center for London, an independent think tank dedicated to the development of innovative solutions for the English capital, the book is inspired by the great retrospective of 2013 at the Royal Academy of Arts "Inside Out" , which retraced Rogers' career from the beginnings to the large-scale projects of the Rogers Stirk Harbor + Partners studio.