Talk of the town

With his inside-out buildings, wedged skyscrapers and skyline-poking struts, Richard Rogers changed the London landscape, as well as pioneering sustainable urban living, as Carla Passino discovers

- Carla Passino

ON a cold winter morning, the Cheesegrater, soaring untroubled above the traffic in London's Leadenhall Street, almost shaves flakes off a passing cloud. The wedged skyscraper is perhaps Richard, Lord Rogers's most visible contribution to the city's skyline since yellow spikes rose from the Millennium Dome's white doughnut to pierce the sky in 1999. Both caused a stir, but ask Ruth Rogers, who was married to the late architect for almost 50 years, whether either of these buildings (or any other designed by his practice) was her husband's favourite and she smiles off the idea: 'It's like saying: "Do you have a favourite child?"

However, Rogers did like to return to some buildings more frequently, including the Millennium Dome, the Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste in Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France (the last place he designed, for his friend Paddy McKillen, before retiring), and, perhaps above all, the Centre Pompidou, which he visited every time he was in Paris. Only once, recalls Lady Rogers, he declared himself too tired to go to the Pompidou. 'It was like an alarm bell ringing. I thought: "There must be something really wrong." On their return to London, it turned out he had Lyme disease.

It would have been surprising for Rogers not to have a soft spot for the Pompidou, which he designed with Renzo Piano in 197177: so revolutionary that it bordered on architectural madness, it was one of the earliest inside-out buildings, where pipework was deliberately shown off in bold colours. Critics initially excoriated it (Le Figaro called it 'Paris's own monster'), but the building proved a huge success and propelled Rogers to international fame, fully vindicating a young boy that had once been dismissed as 'too stupid' to amount to much.