Forty-two years before Ikea introduced flat-packed emergency housing for refugees, Richard Rogers conceived an entire hospital that could be crated and air-dropped into a needy village. Around the same time, Rogers also designed an ultra-low-cost ‘zip-up house’, assembled from rows of aluminum enclosures made to insulate refrigerated trucks. (As your family expanded, you simply zipped on more of the mass-produced units; you unzipped them as your children moved out.) The Centre Pompidou in Paris – designed in partnership with Renzo Piano in the ’70s – has established Rogers as one of architecture’s most colorful stylists. But the truth is that Rogers is a pragmatist.
A Richard Rogers retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts brings pragmatic context to the Pompidou and other Rogers icons including the Lloyd’s of London headquarters. In both