Richard Rogers Wins Pritzker

He made his name in London, Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo, and now he's making his mark on New York, too, with four major projects in development. Richard Rogers, one of Britain's handful of architect-knights, has just been awarded the 2007 Pritzker Prize, architecture's top honor.

For many people, Rogers' most iconic project is still the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he completed in 1977 while partners with Renzo Piano. The inside-out building lasciviously exposed its structural and mechanical guts in public, liberating us all to become shameless architectural voyeurs. For this radical gesture and its subsequent incarnations, the NY Times today praises Rogers as a progressive iconoclast.

Rogers' penchant for structure-as-ornament appears in the upcoming New York projects too. His planned tower at the World Trade Center site, 175 Greenwich, is perhaps the best of the litter down there. Unlike the Calatrava transit hub, it doesn't make a fetish out of its own bones. Yet the skyscraper's exterior trusswork lattice creates a kind of three-dimensional, high-performance textile that stands out against the the other offerings.

Rogers is also working on the billion-dollar Silvercup Studios high-rise cluster across from the UN Building. In this case, the architect found convenient justification for the cross-bracing in the structure of the adjacent Queensboro Bridge. NY Magazine had the scoop in its NYC 2016 issue last year. Additional renderings are available at the architect's website. The other two local projects are the expansion of the Javits Center, which he described as potentially the most exciting because it presents the chance to transform a chunk of decrepit urban space; and the redesign of Manhattan's East River waterfront.

The Pritzker Prize comes with a $100,000 award paid for by the Hyatt Foundation. Jury members include the Indian architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, Vitra chairman Rolf Fehlbaum, 1989 Pritzker-winner Frank Gehry, Houston architect Carlos Jiminez, historian Victoria Newhouse, and Phaidon editor Karen Stein.

Other fun facts about Richard Rogers:
- He was "seriously considering a career in dentistry" when he graduated from high school in 1951, according to the Times.
- Senior partners at his firm, Richard Rogers Partnership, are allowed to make no more than six times the salary of the lowest-paid architect.
- He has championed of ecologically progressive design, having authored books such as "Cities for a Small Planet."
- He had a short partnership with Norman Foster in the 1960s. Foster, of course, is designing one of the other WTC towers.

More:
Architectural Record: Rogers Designing Dramatic New Home for Silvercup Studios

Rendering of WTC site courtesy Richard Rogers Partnership, Team Macarie. Image of Silvercup West from the Richard Rogers Partnership and Silver Cup Studios. Portrait or Richard Rogers by Dan Stevens. Centre Pompidou / Place Beaubourg by Katsuhisa Kida.