Goodbye Richard

B&B Italia pays tribute to Richard Rogers who passed away in London last 18th December 2021. Master of avant-garde architecture, Richard Rogers conceived the B&B Italia’s Headquarters in Novedrate in 1972 together with the Italian Architect Renzo Piano.

Designed at the same time as the Centre Pompidou - the building that brought Piano and Rogers to worldwide fame - the B&B Italia headquarters represent a sort of full scale prototype of the building concepts applied to create the “Beaubourg”, as the Centre Pompidou is also known.

Even before building began on the large, revolutionary arts centre in Paris, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers had the chance to test out in Novedrate the idea of a living space “suspended” from an external structure made from steel pipes: a design which simultaneously allowed to use large transparent vertical surfaces (the walls no longer have to be load-bearing), free the space (increasing its flexibility and allowing for adaptation to different functions) and bring the inhabitants and the building itself into a dialogue with the green space outside.

B&B Italia’s Headquarters thus became a sort of “manifesto” of its industrial business culture: innovative materials and construction solutions, functional flexibility of products systems, as well as careful research to ensure their strength and long life - against any type of planned or involuntary obsolescence - thus creating a link between the building and the products created inside it.