How Los Angeles shaped Richard Rogers, Pompidou architect

In the early 1960s, a young British graduate student in the architecture program at Yale University set out with two fellow British students for an architectural road trip around the United States. As Rogers told The Times’ William Tuohy in 1995, “The California experience was very influential.” Rogers, who gleefully upended architectural convention throughout his career with projects that celebrated the often obscured mechanics of building design — their frames, their escalators, their duct work and their grimy service cores — died Saturday at the age of 88. In addition, the steel beams that supported the structure were painted a sparkling, very un-British yellow — part of a buoyant color palette that would appear in some of Rogers’ future endeavors, including the terminal he designed for Madrid’s Barajas Airport and the interior of the Leadenhall Building, a London skyscraper known as “the Cheesegrater,” completed in 2014. “His absence is very close, but his presence remains with me.” Foster, with whom Rogers would remain dear friends throughout his life, wrote on his Instagram page: “My longest and closest friend Richard just passed away — I will miss him dearly.” Architect Richard Rogers, center, with Yale University schoolmates Norman Foster, left, and Carl Abbott in the 1960s. “Toward an Urban Renaissance” sounds a note of caution about British planning going the route of “the extreme forms of social isolation of many American suburbs.” As a chilling example it featured a photograph of Los Angeles: a bird’s eye view of the 110 and 105 Freeway interchange carving an indiscriminate path through South L.A. L.A. sprawl likewise appears as a cautionary tale in his 1998 book, “Cities for a Small Planet.” He described the car as a “mobile fortress” and paints an exceedingly dour view of a desolate city center disconnected from suburbs rife with paranoias about security.