Rogers

LOS ANGELES (Reuters):

British modernist architect Richard Rogers, whose Pompidou Center in Paris opened to career-threatening catcalls but fast became a beloved public space, won architecture's highest award on Wednesday - the Pritzker Prize.

The 73-year-old Rogers, whose major works also include the Lloyd's of London headquarters in the City of London and the rainbow-coloured, nearly mile-long Terminal 4 at Barajas airport in Madrid, will receive the US$100,000 grant for a lifetime of achievement at a ceremony on June 4 inside a prize of British architecture - the Banqueting House, built in 1619 by Inigo Jones.

In announcing Rogers selection, Thomas Pritzker, president of the U.S.-based Hyatt Foundation, said, "Rogers is a champion of urban life and believes the potential of the city to be a catalyst for social change."

Creator of his own brand

Pritzker jury chairman, Lord Palumbo, called Rogers not only a master of the large urban building but the creator of his own brand of architectural Expressionism.

Lord Palumbo said the high-tech Pompidou Center, designed in partnership with Renzo Piano and completed in 1977, was a work that revolutionised museums, turning them from elitist monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange.

In an interview with Reuters, Rogers said that he and Piano turned out creating what the public called "a fun palace" just a short walk from the Louvre and Notre Dame Cathedral, though they certainly did not know it at the time.

Their one-million-square foot (92,900 sq metre) modernist museum shocked Paris by putting the inner workings of a building outside in the street for all to see ?— including having 'exterior' escalators enclosed in a transparent tube.

An artists conception of a building at 175 Greenwich Street at the World Trade Center in New York by British modernist architect Richard Rogers. - Reuters