D.Most people associate the name of the architect Richard Rogers with a building that he designed together with Renzo Piano and that is one of the few buildings that can be said to have changed the history of architecture. The Center Pompidou in Paris was a cultural machine the likes of which had never existed before – not a temple of art veneration in the subtle bourgeois colors of beige and classic white, not a Valhalla, but a huge workshop for what has since been called “cultural production” for a reason . The Pompidou was a colorful factory for the head and eyes that was open to all citizens, an information machine that was supposed to democratize access to culture and make art, theater, music and literature part of the everyday life of all citizens. Today it is one of the most popular buildings of the modern era and has more visitors than the Eiffel Tower and Louvre combined.
Rogers, who was born in Florence in 1933 to a potter and a dentist, grew up watching Brunelleschi’s constructive masterpiece of the dome before the family fled to London as the war broke out. There and at Yale he studied architecture – and was interested in a time when contemporary architecture was producing more and more expressive concrete sculptures, especially in the industrial buildings of the early modern period. Rogers built in the spirit of the great world exhibition halls and crystal palaces of Joseph Paxton, developed flexible, light living systems made of steel, glass and aluminum and celebrated less the sculptural nature of concrete than the drama of all the functions and liquids that keep the structure alive, but otherwise be artfully hidden behind an even facade. At the Pompidou he rolled the entrails inside out: heating, air supply, water, electricity, escalators, elevators – all of this ended up painted in bright colors on the outside. That didn’t look nice in the classic sense – many visitors stood in front of the building as speechless as anatomy students in front of a skinned creature whose muscles, veins and bones suddenly become visible – but it was all the more energetic and ensured maximum flexibility and openness inside.
A second fundamental work from this spirit was the construction of the skyscraper for Lloyd’s of London: This tower was also a modern cathedral in which the escalators were staged as mechanical sculpture that restlessly pumps people through the interior of the machine. Almost all of Rogers’ buildings are such energy machines, pacemakers for the modern city: their appearance promises great intensity, flexibility, movement, and metabolism. With Sir Norman Foster, with whom he worked from 1963 to 1968 in the office community “Team 4”, Rogers shared an interest in the visible construction; but his love for the buttresses, which are also visible from the outside, for the restlessness, for the flickering and hissing of Gothic cathedrals, can be seen even more clearly than with Foster.
Later, Rogers built, among other things, the comparatively perfectly functioning Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport. How much he loved the large halls and avoided everything that was restrictive and cozy is shown by his several storeys high private house in the London borough of Chelsea, where he had the ceilings removed so that it looked like a makeshift factory hall itself. Prince Charles once lamented that Rogers’ architecture was atypical for England – which can only be said if one understands British architecture to be habitable tweed jackets or Chesterfield sofas with doors and windows.
One only has to read Erwin Panofsky’s essay on the “ideological forerunners of the Rolls-Royce grille” to understand that Rogers stands in a great tradition of British enthusiasm for Italy – which is always also an enthusiasm for the constructive masterpieces, the great public buildings of the Renaissance was. In addition to the glittering and sparkling machines of modern public life that the Italobrite Rogers designed, there were models for environmentally friendly wooden towers with facades that can catch wind and sun and heat water. These building visions also marked a transition: from the house as a technoid machine to the house as a primarily biologically intelligent body structure. At the end of his life, the architect left a utopia for the next epoch, the post-industrial, circular climate age. Now Rogers has died in London at the age of 88.
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