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" Photo: Richard Bryant Ab Rogers was eight years old when his father, architect Richard Rogers, first took him to see the Pompidou Center, then nearing completion in a rundown neighborhood of Paris. When Ab [pronounced &amp;quot;Abe&amp;quot;] asked about the red tube that angles down the glass front of the building, his father told him it would house a giant slide. Ab believed him, and why not: Richard and his then-partner Renzo Piano had created one of the world&amp;#039;s most playful buildings. Thirty years later, Ab Rogers, now an acclaimed designer, is back at the Pompidou, and this time he has put his own stamp on the iconic museum. The occasion is a retrospective of his father&amp;#039;s Pritzker Prize\u2013winning work, timed to coincide with the Pompidou&amp;#039;s 30th anniversary (through Mar. 3, 2008; CentrePompidou. fr). As the exhibition designer, Ab placed models of his father&amp;#039;s buildings on a series of metal-and-laminate tables that add hot pink, tangerine and chartreuse to the building&amp;#039;s color scheme while embracing every possible angle, except right. &amp;quot;Richard&amp;#039;s work is more analytic, based on diagrams and grids; mine is more emotionally expressive,&amp;quot; observes Ab, now 38. And yet the similarities in their approaches are apparent. Some of the best buildings by Richard Rogers are machine-like structures that appear ready to move at the touch of a button. In his own work, Ab pushes that button: A series of lipstick-red fiberglass cubes twirl around the Comme des Gar\u00E7ons shop he designed in Paris; at Michel Guillon, a London eyewear emporium, glasses shoot out, seemingly randomly, from mirrored backdrops (giving new meaning to &amp;quot;spectacle&amp;quot;). More recently, he created a store for the Russian designer Katia Gomiashvili\u2014her brand is called Emperor Moth\u2014featuring dancing mannequins reflected in 320 jutting mirrors. If he is breaking new ground with his phantasmagorical and kinetic interiors, he has his father to thank. &amp;quot;I think Richard&amp;#039;s work influenced me most by showing that you can do anything\u2014you don&amp;#039;t have to adhere to the norm.&amp;quot;  Photo: Grant Smith  Ab says that as a young man he was &amp;quot;marinated in architecture.&amp;quot; After his parents&amp;#039; divorce, when he was 2, he lived with his architect mother (Su Rogers) and stepfather (John Miller). In the 1980s he found himself working at a furniture-making cooperative in Liverpool, where he gradually began designing wooden pieces. In 1997 he formed a partnership with Shona Kitchen (a classmate at the Royal College of Art) that produced a number of giddily inventive interiors. That partnership dissolved amicably in 2004, an echo of his father&amp;#039;s friendly split from Piano in the late 1970s. There are other father-son parallels: has offices in a house in Wimbledon that Richard designed for his own parents in 1968; the so-called Dr. Rogers House is one of the first buildings where Richard&amp;#039;s trademarks\u2014bright colors, transparency, articulated parts\u2014were evident. Ali Tayar, a New York architect, says that, after visiting the house, &amp;quot;You can see where Ab got his love of color and his joy for experimentation.&amp;quot; Tayar&amp;#039;s most recent trip to the house coincided with a meeting between Ab and Richard to review models of the Pompidou exhibition (which will move to London&amp;#039;s Design Museum in April). Says Tayar, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve never seen a father and son get along so well.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/a1287/like-father-like-son-45934/>