The architect Richard Rogers, 88, died yesterday. His obituaries invariably started by mentioning the Centre Pompidou, the seriously ill-conceived museum that turned the youthful Rogers and his partner Renzo Piano, into overnight sensations. I remember that when I was a member of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., a now seasoned Rogers came before us to present 300 New Jersey Avenue, an addition to an old office building near Union Station. The limestone building was designed in 1935 by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon (the architects of the Empire State Building), a fine example of early American modernism: a blend of practical engineering, Beaux-Arts planning, and an Art Deco sensibility. When Rogers presented his concept—a ten-story glass wing that created a triangular atrium between the new and the old buildings—the sketchy drawings and a patchy model were hard to understand. Exactly where was the design heading? Over subsequent presentations, the project slowly jelled, but was still hard to follow. A few years later, my fellow commissioner, Michael McKinnell, and I went to see the built result. The jungle-gym aesthetic, structural struts, and brash colors, were world’s away from Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s orderly design. “That was then, this is now,” seemed to be Rogers’s message. Contrasting the new with the old has become an architectural cliché that often leaves the old in its dust, but here we came away admiring both buildings. Both evinced a strong sense of conviction—a key architectural quality. Chapeau, M. Rogers!
