In the heady days just after the opening in 1977 of the Pompidou Center, one of its two previously underemployed architects, Richard Rogers, was gazing at his creation in the rain when an elderly lady offered him shelter under her umbrella and asked what he thought of the building.

I am the architect, he beamed, whereupon she hit him over the head with her umbrella.

That was then. This year has been what Lord Rogers (raised to the peerage by Tony Blair in 1996) calls fantastically good for him, with several awards including the Pritzker, which is always called the architect’s Nobel, and a retrospective from Nov. 21 at the Pompidou to celebrate the center’s 30th birthday. He was in Paris for a meeting at the Pompidou and to attend a gathering of 14 international architects - les starchitectes, the French labelled them - with President Nicolas Sarkozy. The day before he had been in Milan to celebrate the 70th birthday of his Pompidou partner, Renzo Piano. “We are like brothers,” he says.

Read full article (International Herald Tribune, October 1, 2007)

See also the Pritzker award ceremony video, and the following video on youtube:

Architectural model of design for Punta della Dogana by Tadao Ando

François Pinault plans to transform Venice’s Dogana into a museum by the next Venice Biennale, in 2009. As Le Monde’s Grégoire Allix reports, Pinault—the private collector, the owner of Christie’s auction house and Haunch of Venison gallery, and a shareholder in Le Monde—revealed the architectural model at a press conference last week in Venice. Accompanied by Venice mayor Massimo Cacciari and the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, Pinault lauded the “efficiency of the Italian administration,” which last April chose his project for the Dogana over the Guggenheim’s competing plan.

Taken from Artforum (September 25, 2007)