A Place for All People

January 22, 2018
British architect Rogers, who is known for his exoskeleton designs, offers thoughts on his life and craft with the same admirable transparency that characterizes his buildings. Rogers takes readers behind the scenes of his storied career, from early residential and industrial projects to his large-scale corporate and civic commissions. Combining elements of memoir and monograph, he mixes details from cantilever engineering for the Pompidou Center with personal anecdotes, as when he met the prime minister of France while wearing a denim suit. The story of his collaboration with Renzo Piano on the winning entry in the Pompidou Center competition brings to mind two college students scrambling during finals week: the architects cut and pasted drawings in a late-night post office in Leicester Square, and then smudged the postmark to comply with the competition’s deadline. Rogers is relatable throughout, still raffish despite his title (he was knighted in 1991). For an architect whose works are consistently avant-garde, Rogers’s book is surprisingly down to earth.