In October 1938, William Nino Rogers came back to England,[2] having fled Fascist Italy and anti-Jewish laws under Mussolini.

Rogers did not excel academically, which made him believe that he was "stupid because he could not read or memorise his school work"[3] and as a consequence, he said, he became "very depressed".

[10] In early 1968 he was commissioned to design a house and studio for Humphrey Spender near Maldon, Essex, a glass cube framed with I-beams.

[11] Rogers subsequently joined forces with Italian architect Renzo Piano, a partnership that was to prove fruitful.

His career leapt forward when he, Piano and Gianfranco Franchini won the design competition for the Pompidou Centre in July 1971, alongside a team from Ove Arup that included Irish engineer Peter Rice.

Rogers devoted much of his later career to wider issues surrounding architecture, urbanism, sustainability, and the ways in which cities are used.

One early illustration of his thinking was an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1986, entitled "London As It Could Be", which also featured the work of James Stirling and Rogers's former partner Norman Foster.

This exhibition made public a series of proposals for transforming a large area of central London, subsequently dismissed as impractical by the city's authorities.

Perhaps the most famous of these, the Millennium Dome, was designed by the Rogers practice in conjunction with engineering firm Buro Happold and completed in 1999.

[75] In February 2006, Rogers hosted the inaugural meeting of the campaigning organisation Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP) in his London offices.

At that time his practice had secured a number of projects in New York, including the redevelopment of the Silvercup Studios site, a masterplan for the East River Waterfront and a commission for a $1.7 billion expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Centre in Manhattan.

[76] He announced his withdrawal with the statement, "I unequivocally renounce Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine and have withdrawn my relationship with them.

He had fourteen grandchildren and a younger brother, Peter William Rogers, a property developer and co-founder of Stanhope.

[91] In 2006, the Richard Rogers Partnership was awarded the Stirling Prize for Terminal 4 of Barajas Airport,[92] and again in 2009 for Maggie's Centre in London.

In 2012, Rogers was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of the last six decades.