Richard Rogers first came to prominence with his radical designs for the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd's of London building.

Lord Rogers was regarded as one of the world's most successful and influential architects, and he won most of his industry's major honours. He was knighted in 1991.

Born in 1933 to an Anglo-Italian family in Florence, he trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London before graduating with a master's from Yale.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he became widely known for two buildings that were controversial at the time for putting amenities like lifts and air conditioning ducts on the outside - the Pompidou in Paris and the Lloyds building in London.

His other creations included the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff, Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport and Terminal 4 of Madrid's Barajas Airport.

He also built 3 World Trade Center in New York, an 80-storey skyscraper on the site of the former Twin Towers.

His critics over the years included Prince Charles, who spoke about his dislike of Lord Rogers' designs on several occasions.

Rogers was born in Florence, still the city he knows best. “I came from a rather spoilt, upper-middle-class family,” he said.

His father, Nino, was a doctor who had grown up in Venice, and his mother, Dada, was an art-lover from Trieste who had once been taught English by James Joyce.

They were cultured, and highly cosmopolitan. “I wasn’t called Riccardo,” he says. “I was called Richard, which was a very strange thing.

But my father, you see, was totally anglophile [Nino’s father, a dentist, was a British emigre to Italy]. He didn’t actually wear patches on the elbows of his jackets – which is something Renzo does – but in a way, he was more English than Italian. He always dreamt of England.”

Thanks to Mussolini, his dreams would become a reality sooner rather than later.

In 1938, once it was clear that war was on the way, the family moved to England, swapping their elegant flat with views over the Florentine rooftops for a single room in a Bayswater boarding house with a coin meter for the heating and a bath in a cupboard – and so life switched to black and white.

“It was hell at first,” says Rogers. “My dad arrived with only £800 in his pocket. There was rationing. London was smoggy and cold. But… you have to be careful how you say this. Obviously, if someone in your family was killed in the war, that was one thing."

"But in a way, for us boys, it was a game [he has one brother]. We didn’t know about the camps, and so on. And England has never since been healthier or its society more fair.”

Nevertheless, he felt his parents had let him down. On his first Christmas, his only present was a grey lead toy submarine.

He hated Kingswood, the boarding school to which he was sent first, but was happier at St John’s in Leatherhead (by now, the family had moved to Godalming in Surrey, and he could cycle there every day).

Still, he struggled academically. “I really was backward,” he says. “Dyslexia wasn’t invented then, and I was called stupid.”

A private school in the 1940s, clenched and conservative, probably wasn’t the place for him, “though I mixed easily and, being a boxer, knew how to look after myself”.

His politics, inherited from his parents, were leftist, and he shared their enthusiasm for modernism (visiting the Festival of Britain in 1951 with his mother, he marvelled at the way art and science came together in the Dome of Discovery).

“They were strict in some ways. But as a teenager, they didn’t mind who I slept with, so long as she was there for breakfast. I was brought up to be free.”

As soon as the war was over, he and his parents began spending their summers in Italy again, and at the age of 17, he began to travel alone.

“I was adventurous,” he wrote.

“I ran with the bulls in Pamplona, and dodged ticket collectors by hanging on the outside of trains; I spent a night in the cells in San Sebastian after being arrested by the Franco-ist Guardia Civil for swimming naked in the sea.” 

He left school in 1951, with no A-levels and no idea of what he wanted to do – and to buy himself time, he chose to do his national service immediately. Because he could speak Italian, he was posted to Trieste, then still under British and US military rule.

What luck!

His grandfather gave him a season ticket to the Trieste opera, and being in Italy meant he could also see more of his cousin, Ernesto Rogers, a noted modernist architect whose practice, BBPR, was in Milan.

On periods of leave, he worked in the BBPR office.

Once his service was complete, then, he somehow convinced the Architectural Association in London that even though he’d failed his exams, he might be allowed to join its diploma course.

He didn’t draw well: by his own account, he still doesn’t.

But by the time he reached his final year, something had changed. He received the association’s final-year prize for his project, a design for children with special educational needs in Wales.

He met Su Brumwell, his first wife and the mother of three of his five sons, in his third year (she was doing a sociology degree at the LSE), and after their marriage in 1960, they travelled together to Yale, where he would take up a Fulbright scholarship to study for his master’s degree.

It was at Yale that he struck up a friendship with Norman Foster, also on a scholarship.

Back in England, he and Su and Foster and his wife, Wendy Cheeseman, formed the firm Team 4, and worked together to design Creek Vean for Roger’s parents-in-law, a dramatic concrete house in Cornwall that vaguely calls to mind Frank Lloyd Wright.

He and Su also worked, a little later, on a home for his parents, Parkside in Wimbledon, comprising two brightly coloured single-storey pavilions with steel frames. Both are now listed.

“I think I would have had a go at designing for the devil at that moment,” he says, laughing.

The Brumwells were, he says, the better clients.

What about his parents? Can he remember the moment when they clapped eyes on the finished article? Did they love it?

“Well, yes and no. My father was more concerned with practical problems: I think he was about to sue by then. It was my mother who had the eye. She loved beauty and colour.”

Still, he learnt a lot from both projects: “It took six architects six years to get Creek Vean built, as well as almost bankrupting both us and our in-laws. Not much was being done for society there, and it made us think: there must be a better way. We moved to easier construction systems, and highly flexible ones, too.” Team 4, however, was dissolved in 1967.

Rogers was introduced to Renzo Piano by his doctor; they bonded immediately, and together they entered the competition to design a grand new cultural centre for Paris: the building that would become the Pompidou Centre.

Having won it, they had no idea what it was that that they where taking on.

“Young architects are immensely naive,” he says. “I would never dream of doing it now. We had a great client, but the press gave us hell. In seven years, there were only two positive articles. I don’t know how we got to the end.”

Sonia Delaunay, an artist who was proposing to give a large collection of works to the museum, announced that she would rather burn her paintings than see them in the space he and Piano were designing.

An elderly Frenchwoman, on discovering his identity as its architect, once hit him on the head with her umbrella.

But everything changed once it opened. “It was successful, even if we made very little money out of it.”

Does he feel it blazed a trail, a forerunner of the ever more extraordinary museum buildings that have been built the world over ever since? He insists not.

“I think we were just making the building we had to: a loose container, a great big piazza, and a facade; a cross between Times Square and the British Museum.”

Editors note | I have put up this tribute to Richard Rogers because the Pompidou Centre, designed by Richard Roger, Sue Rogers & Renzo Piano was one of the modernist icons that encouraged me to pursue my passion for architecture.

Sue Rogers was my tutor at The Royal College of Art in London where I did my Masters Degree in Architecture.