The work of the late Richard Rogers is being celebrated in a new exhibition that shows how Britain’s most famous modern architect broke the rules to create an unprecedentedly innovative inside-out way of building, bright with bold colour.
The late Baron Rogers of Riverside transformed 20th century architecture by putting pipes and other functional equipment on public display, designing unfussy box houses which could be thrown up fast from prefabricated components and dressing himself as well as his creations in huge colour fields of lemon, lime green, orange and shocking pink which shouted joy to the world.
These were all the trademark of Italian-born Rogers, who arrived in the UK in 1938 when his father fled the Fascists and Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws. Despite being considered a dunce at school – undiagnosed dyslexia meant he could not read till he was 11 – he formed partnerships with other world-famous architects including Norman Foster and Renzo Piano and went on to win every prize in the book for his own contributions to some of the most striking buildings on the globe.
While the Lloyds Building, the Pompidou Centre and the Millennium Dome are familiar aspects of his legacy, the exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum showcases eight of the late architect’s favourite projects, including the lesser-known Zip-Up House, an architectural response to fast, affordable ’60s fashion, which, though never built, was hugely influential, pre-dating today’s shipping container homes by half a century. “Buying clothes off the rack is the norm. We wanted to do the same for the house,” Rogers said of the prototype he co-designed with his first wife Su.
Zip-Up House model
The same principles – inexpensive, mass-produced components flooded with warm colour – were applied to the home built in 1969 for Rogers’ parents on a bright yellow steel frame. Two single-storey pavilions separated by a central garden, it doubled as a design studio and pottery as well as a private home.
Within two years Rogers had formed a new partnership with Renzo Piano and won the Pompidou Centre commission, creating a cultural centre which shocked Paris by not only exposing the service pipes but highlighting them with bright hues colour-coded to their functions – green for water, yellow for electricity, blue for the air-conditioning which had not yet been assigned a standard colour by mechanical engineers of the 1970s. A year after it was completed, the new Richard Rogers Partnership won the commission for the no less startling Lloyd’s of London building. Knighted in 1991, Rogers further stamped his signature on the city he made his home with the Millennium Dome.
One of his least-known projects was the most outrageously ambitious – a gallery in Provence thrillingly cantilevered over a hillside completed in 2020, the year before he died at the age of 88. Seeming to barely touch the ground, it draws visitors down an opaque tube towards a huge window overlooking vineyards in the Mediterranean landscape he loved. Every summer the father of five and grandfather of 14 would retreat to a farmhouse in Tuscany with his second wife Ruth, who became almost as famous for creating the River Café restaurant in Hammersmith, originally a canteen for the architectural practice next door.
While tiny, quirky Sir John Soane’s Museum, packed with architectural motifs of the past, seems an unlikely venue for the new show, director Will Gompertz points to the bright yellow walls of the drawing-room as proof of the fact that Soanes was channelling Rogers a century before the architect’s birth. And the intimacy of the venue allows visitors to get up close and personal with the tiny models, which suggest a little boy fascinated with toy cars who grew up to make boxes to live and work in that never lost that sense of playfulness he believed adults had a right to enjoy throughout their lifetime.
Richard Rogers: Talking Buildings is at Sir John Soane’s Museum until September 21. soane.org
