Like Father, Like Son

Pritzker Prize–winner Sir Richard Rogers and son Ab prove talent is a family affair

Written by Fred A. Bernstein

Photo: Richard Bryant

Ab Rogers was eight years old when his father, architect Richard Rogers, first took him to see the Pompidou Center, then nearing completion in a rundown neighborhood of Paris. When Ab [pronounced “Abe”] asked about the red tube that angles down the glass front of the building, his father told him it would house a giant slide. Ab believed him, and why not: Richard and his then-partner Renzo Piano had created one of the world’s most playful buildings.

Thirty years later, Ab Rogers, now an acclaimed designer, is back at the Pompidou, and this time he has put his own stamp on the iconic museum. The occasion is a retrospective of his father’s Pritzker Prize–winning work, timed to coincide with the Pompidou’s 30th anniversary (through Mar. 3, 2008; CentrePompidou. fr). As the exhibition designer, Ab placed models of his father’s buildings on a series of metal-and-laminate tables that add hot pink, tangerine and chartreuse to the building’s color scheme while embracing every possible angle, except right. “Richard’s work is more analytic, based on diagrams and grids; mine is more emotionally expressive,” observes Ab, now 38.

And yet the similarities in their approaches are apparent. Some of the best buildings by Richard Rogers are machine-like structures that appear ready to move at the touch of a button. In his own work, Ab pushes that button: A series of lipstick-red fiberglass cubes twirl around the Comme des Garçons shop he designed in Paris; at Michel Guillon, a London eyewear emporium, glasses shoot out, seemingly randomly, from mirrored backdrops (giving new meaning to “spectacle”). More recently, he created a store for the Russian designer Katia Gomiashvili—her brand is called Emperor Moth—featuring dancing mannequins reflected in 320 jutting mirrors. If he is breaking new ground with his phantasmagorical and kinetic interiors, he has his father to thank. “I think Richard’s work influenced me most by showing that you can do anything—you don’t have to adhere to the norm.”

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