When the author Deborah Copaken Kogan opened Richard Rogers’s sock drawer, she started to cry. “It was beautiful. It was perfect,” she wrote in The New Yorker in 2012. “It did not only what a good sock drawer should do—organize socks—it did what great works of art aspire to do. It took the bedlam of everyday life, organized it with careful attention to spatial harmony, color balance, and composition, and transformed it from chaos to order, from ordinary to extraordinary, from a simple container for necessities into a perfect expression of the artist’s philosophy: minimalism, bright colors, functionality, form.”
That philosophy was expressed in Rogers’s break-out success, the Pompidou Center in Paris, which he designed with Renzo Piano half a century ago, and later buildings that combined an industrial esthetic with a playfulness that matched his exuberant personality and his colorful wardrobe. Rogers was 88 when he died at home in London on Saturday, surrounded by his family. His son, Ab Rogers, said his father would want to be remembered as a humanist who thought not just about architectural details but about larger issues of planning and policy. “Everyone should be able to see a tree outside their window,” he told Record, distilling his father’s views.
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