The passing of British architect Richard Rogers at the age of 88 marks the loss of one of the architects who shaped the past four decades, says Catherine Slessor.

"Ciao vecchio", said Renzo Piano, famously, when calling Richard Rogers to let him know that their fledgling practice had won the competition for the Pompidou Centre. "Are you sitting down""
Vecchio ? old man. The joke was that they were both in their late 30s ? relative whippersnappers as far as architecture is concerned ? but Rogers was four years older than Piano.
Now, with Rogers finally gone at 88 ? molto vecchio ? there is a melancholic sense of slow extinguishing, a point of light disappearing from a constellation of architects that shaped the last 40 years. Rogers' star burned especially furiously, a stellar intensity illuminating leaden, dreary, exhausted post-war Britain. Born in Florence, scion of a cultured and well-connected Anglo-Italian family, he was transplanted to gloomy England in the late 30s, but his appetite for the food, cityscapes, atmosphere and general bella figura of mediterranean Europe remained perpetually undiminished.
Rogers' star burned especially furiously
There was no townscape problem that could not be solved by an infusion of cafe culture. An unrealised proposal to drape London's South Bank in an undulating glass roof would have had, in Rogers' view, the wholly desirable effect of blotting out the terrible English weather (and perhaps England itself) an...