Grand designs: Celebrating Richard Rogers

Forty years ago, an idealistic young architect entered a competition along with a friend to co-design a new cultural building in Paris. Out of 681 entries, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano's radically new concept won the gig. Theirs was an unprecedented type of art space: one that was accessible, modern and open. Realised in steel and glass, all visible structural beams and corridors, with its exterior industrial guts all painted in what would become Rogers’ trademark use of colour, the Pompidou Centre in Paris redefined the very concept of what a museum could be. This year, throughout France, the centre will celebrate its silver anniversary with more than 50 exhibitions and events.

You'll know Rogers already through his buildings – they have a habit of becoming landmarks, whether tactile single-forms such as the Millennium Dome and Heathrow's Terminal 5, or high-rise statements such as Mexico City's BBVA building or the Hesperia Hotel in Catalonia.

On this side of the pond, London's The Leadenhall Building rises up above the other skyscrapers of the Square Mile like the mast of a giant boat with its sail out. Or rather, like a cheese grater, but a slender, 738ft-tall one, covered with more than 750,000sq-ft of shimmering glass. Its ten-degree taper was Rogers's ingenious way of preserving views from Fleet Street across to St Paul's Cathedral and the Westminster Palace. Its large, open reception area begins in a pedestrian square, with escalators leading up from the ground floor directly into the piazza of the building, blurring the boundaries between the retail world outside and the offices inside; while the airy public spaces and use of vivid colour makes the Leadenhall one of the most progressive integrations of work and play within the City of London.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Taller still is 3 World Trade Center, currently under construction in New York. At 1,150ft tall, the building's 80 storeys contain a mix of retail and office space with walls of windows providing views of the memorial outside.

Loftier in its ideals if not its height, Antwerp's Law Courts are equally impressive. Created to reflect a vision of the city as a "humane and democratic place with a commitment to the regeneration of urban life", it is characterised by its roof – a pool of angular glass, teeming with giant crystalline fins – which presides over the eight different civil and criminal courts (comprising 36 courtrooms) below. It's a sight that greets motorway drivers as they head towards the Schelde River; its steep, narrow promontories cleverly shielding the occupants from traffic noise.

But Rogers' best-known civil building can be found in the country that's honouring him this year. The European Court of Human Rights building in Strasbourg has since 1995 been a part of French, and indeed, European cultural heritage, serving as literal pillars of justice and humanity. Comprising 535 offices, 18 meeting spaces and a press room, the iconic cluster of three cylindrical buildings is home to a court that has been policing the human rights of the 800 million people in the 47 member states subscribing to the European Convention of Human Rights.

Now there's something to celebrate.