Richard Rogers, Hon. FAIA, winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize (and honored with a knighthood), has now added AIA’s highest award to his list of bona fides. Heralded as a high-tech iconoclast and environmentalist who embraced sustainable design before it was fashionable, the Italian-born Rogers partnered with both Norman Foster, Hon. FAIA, and then Renzo Piano, Hon. FAIA, before founding his own London-based firm, now called Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, in 1977. Here he responds to our architect's version of the Proust questionnaire.
What is your greatest achievement?
Surviving School.
What is the most memorable moment of your career?
When Renzo Piano called me to say that we had won the Pompidou Centre competition.
What was your most rewarding collaboration?
Designing the retrospective of our work at the Pompidou in 2008 and the retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts celebrating my 80th birthday [in 2013] with my son, the exhibition designer Ab Rogers.
What is the greatest ambition you have yet to achieve?
The next building.
What’s one building you wish you had done?
Piazza del Campo in Siena.
What’s the one design/project that got away?
Tokyo Forum.
What’s the best way to describe the personality of your practice?
We have a constitution.
What is the greatest challenge facing architects today?
Sustainability.
When did you first realize you wanted to be an architect?
When I met my Italian uncle Ernesto Rogers, BBPR architect and editor of Domus, who encouraged me.
What jobs did your parents have?
My mother was a potter and my father a consultant in renal medicine.
What would you have been if not an architect?
A landscape architect.
What keeps you up at night?
Inequality.
What is your most treasured possession?
I treasure people more than possessions.
What is your greatest extravagance?
My children.
When and where were you the happiest?
At sunset in the Val d’Orcia [in Tuscany] with my family and friends looking at the view of Monte Amiata eating zucchini flowers.
What is your greatest fear?
That we do not do anything about climate change.
Which talent would you most like to have?
As I love to eat, I wish I had learned how to cook, though I do live with a chef.
What does architectural happiness mean?
Working with a great team and engaged clients.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Interrupting someone in the middle of a sentence.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Interrupting someone in the middle of a sentence.
Which artists do you most admire?
I admire all artists. We need to encourage, educate, and support artists.
What’s the last drawing you did?
The Photography Gallery for Château La Coste Art Gallery for my great friend Paddy McKillen.
Which living person do you most admire?
Ruthie Rogers.
Which book(s) are you currently reading?
I am re-reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Ulysses.
What’s the one question you wish we had asked (and the answer to that question)?
Do you find short questions difficult to answer, and my answer is yes.
What does winning the Gold Medal mean to you?
More than I can say.
