One way of understanding Richard Rogers is as a man who wanted everything. He wanted beautiful new buildings, a just and civilized society, and success for himself, his friends and his collaborators. He was generous and tough, romantic and political. He wanted to be in the middle of it all. Such wishes were made for a lifetime of majestic achievement, an impact as great as any British architect has ever had.

Two documents from his youth sum it up. When he was born, his cousin Ernesto Rogers, a fine Milanese architect, wrote him a letter: don’t listen behind the door of life, he advised, kick it down. As a student at the Architectural Association in London, R received a damning report from one of his professors. His drawing was bad, it was said, his method of work chaotic, his critical judgment inarticulate.

He indeed broke the door. The AA report was also largely true. His genius was to overcome his weaknesses with charm, charisma and determination, and to ally himself with other brilliant people who could do what he couldn’t. His early career as an architect was in the Team 4 partnership, with Norman Foster, Foster’s wife, Wendy Cheeseman, and Rogers’ wife, Su, all of whom had skills she lacked. He designed the Center Pompidou in Paris with Renzo Piano and many other talents.

With his second wife, Ruth, Rogers created a social universe around the River Café restaurant, which started out as a canteen for his practice, and the triple-height living space of the house they built by assembling two Chelsea townhouses. An enduring image of Rogers is of him in a cherry or lime green shirt, standing on the house’s sleek steel staircase, with Andy Warhol’s engravings of Chairman Mao on the walls, making a gracious if slightly inconsistent speech to a party that could include a Hollywood star, cultured footballer, or world-famous artist.

Along with his omnivorous desire came a forgetting of the contradiction, the complexity and the stubbornness of the facts. This can be seen in a first house he and Su designed for photographer Humphrey Spender; fascinated by the steel and glass “case study” houses of california, Rogers wanted to do the same in rural Essex, with little regard for differences in climate. During his first winter in the house, Spender sent Rogers an ironic Christmas card, a photograph of the frost patterns that formed on the inside single glazed walls.

The same oversight could be seen in Rogers’ work with Tony Blair, John Prescott and Ken Livingstone to revitalize British cities with the help of good design. This allowed for a real transformation of political and cultural attitudes towards urban life, but it also involved accommodations with property interests at odds with the inclusive principles he defended. There could be conflicts of interest between Rogers the social activist and Rogers the leader of an ambitious practice: “good design” has too often been shown to mean the high-tech style that he and his allies offered. At worst, the results would be something like One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge, an upscale apartment building with fortress-style security systems that don’t give much to the public realm around it.

He might be ruthless in getting his way. Often times, his projects did not work out as advertised or cost his clients dearly. He successfully wielded the power of British libel laws against American author Stewart Brand, whose book How buildings learn had, in its American edition, challenged the claims of Rogers’ designs to be flexible and adaptable. In the British version, as in a retouched Soviet photograph, these sections have been replaced by something quite different.

My relationship with Rogers was often hot. I have criticized projects such as his plan to wrap the Southbank Arts Center in London with a giant glass roof, perhaps with excessive iconoclastic rage. Which he didn’t take nicely. And yet the news of his death, at the age of 88, touched me hard. His courage was phenomenal. And he was, in the end, one of the good guys. The Center Pompidou, half a century after its creation, remains an explosion of joy, energy and invention in the heart of a historic city. Even the clients he nearly went bankrupt, even Spender with his icy house, were won over by the power of his vision.

“Naivety is an important part of creativity,” Rogers told his partner, Graham Stirk. In the case of this particular architectural giant, you couldn’t get one without the other.