Maintaining its longstanding focus on the world’s great architecture, Cersaie will welcome award-winning British architect and designer Lord Richard Rogers, 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, to give the 2018 Keynote Lecture. The event will be held on Tuesday 25 September in Palazzo dei Congressi at BolognaFiere following an introduction by architecture historian Francesco Dal Co.
Lord Rogers (he was knighted in 1991 by Queen Elizabeth II and made Baron Rogers of Riverside in 1996) was born in Florence in 1933 and studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Yale University. After his initial experience with Team 4, the practice he set up together with his first wife Su Rogers and the husband-and-wife team Wendy and Norman Foster, he began a collaboration with Renzo Piano in 1969. In 1971, Piano + Rogers together with Peter Rice, Gianfranco Franchini and Su Rogers won the international competition for the Centre Georges Pompidou in the Beaubourg area of Paris, creating one of the most iconic of all contemporary museum buildings. He founded the Richard Rogers Partnership in 1977 and in 2007 renamed the practice Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) to reflect Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour’s contribution to the practice. Over the past forty years, RSHP has attracted critical acclaim and awards with built projects across Europe, the America, Asia and Australia.
Lord Rogers’ best known works besides the Centre Pompidou include the Lloyd’s of London insurance building in London, the European Court of Human Rights building in Strasbourg, the Daimler complex in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, the Antwerp Law Courts, the Senedd in Cardiff, the Millennium Dome in London, Madrid-Barajas Airport Terminal 4 and London Heathrow Terminal 5.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Lord Rogers served as a consultant for the Grands Projets de Paris programme launched by French President François Mitterrand, and from 2000 to 2003 he was called as an expert by the mayor of Barcelona for the city’s Urban Strategies Council. He was subsequently asked to serve as advisor to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and set up the department of Architecture and Urbanism to promote redevelopment and reuse of redundant industrial land and to improve public spaces.
In addition to the prestigious Pritzker Award received in 2007, Richard Rogers is also the recipient of the RIBA Gold Medal in 1985 and winner of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Medal. He won the Praemium Imperiale Prize for architecture in 2000, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2006 and the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal. In 2008, he became a member of The Order of Companions of Honour. The practice received the Stirling Prize in 2006 for the Madrid Barajas Airport Terminal 4 and in 2009 for the Maggie’s Centre in London.
Lord Rogers recently published his autobiography entitled A Place for All People, describing his life, his projects and his ideas for a better society.