Lord Rogers of Riverside has constructed his world in such a way that his work as an architect and the rest of his life merge seamlessly. When he and his colleagues tire of hunching over their drawing boards they repair to his wife’s famous River Café restaurant nearby, where the sight of a man sketching a kitchen implement or a large phallus on a napkin is probably an indication of what will pop up in London or tower over another world city in a few years time. This office “canteen” is also the preferred venue for business lunches. A discussion about where to locate the guts of a building must be so much more pleasing when you are stuffing your own innards with Ruth’s pannacotta with rhubarb champagne. The Rogers family often go on holiday with the families of other members of the firm. And now he is even collaborating on work projects with his offspring.

Some might interpret this as an indication that work for Richard Rogers is unhealthily all-consuming. The peer says he is lucky to be able to happily combine work and everything else. It is less a balance than a work-life blend. “I’m fortunate, I don’t see the difference between working and play,” he says.

His latest project grew out of a personal friendship. He got to know Maggie Keswick Jencks, an expert on gardens, through her husband Charles Jencks, an architecture writer. Maggie died of breast cancer in 1995 at the age of 53 but not before she had conceived the first Maggie’s Centre; a place of peace and calm where those diagnosed with cancer could go for advice and support away from the impersonal hospital environment. Five centres are thriving in Scotland, including those designed by Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Rogers, who discussed the original concept with Maggie, was the obvious choice to design the first centre in England at the Charing Cross Hospital, a five minute walk from his office.

The centre, which opens later this month, looks set to be an oasis in front of the grim hospital on the traffic-clogged Fulham Palace Road. High walls and frosted glass panels obscure much of the outside world but allow glimpses of trees and sky. The centre, which contains office and social space, has the feel of a large house, centred round a hearth with a wood burning stove, that provides both warmth and, crucially, a non-hospital smell. Visitors will make tea together and can then tuck themselves away round corners and in little nooks overlooking small gardens.

“It’s very much about not looking at these things,” says Rogers, gesturing at the world beyond the walls “and looking into oneself and the gardens and the courtyards that are of human scale. People who use this place have had a pretty heavy shock. This offers the comfort of home rather than a big hospital.”

Maggie Jencks told Rogers her idea of an “anti-institution” where people could go for a chat, advice, a yoga class or to cry quietly out of sight. “When you go to see the specialist you are waiting in the corridor with hundreds of other people and you go in and the specialist says you’ve got cancer and the next thing you are back in the corridor. A bomb is set off inside you,” says Rogers. “Where can you get the comfort or meet people who have been through it before, or heard about it before? This is not about medicine it is about healing oneself and healing with other people so very much about the hearth and the house.”

Rogers is famous for his iconic buildings, the best known of which are probably the Pompidou Centre in Paris which, with its entrails hanging on the outside made his name, and the Lloyds building in the City. More recently his big projects have included the Millennium Dome, which he is delighted is finally a success (“Who wants to see things empty? It’s depressing”), Madrid airport, for which the practice won the Stirling Prize and Terminal 5 at Heathrow.

But Rogers is not just an architect of the grandest of grand designs. Although he left Florence at the age of six when his left wing intellectual parents fled the fascists, he has continued to visit relations and friends there all his life and the city has informed his work greatly. “I’ve spent a lot of my life going to Italy and that has a strong influence.” He believes vibrant cities are those that are filled with public spaces where people can congregate after they leave the big family dining table. He gets to indulge his love of piazzas when creating the mini cities that are airports. His Maggie’s House, with its sliding temporary walls and kitchen focus was a chance to create a more intimate social forum.

The first design that Rogers saw translated into bricks and mortar was a house. He and his first wife, Su, and Norman Foster and his then wife, Wendy Cheeseman., were in business together as Team 4. Over an agonising and nearly bankrupting three years they built Creek Vean, a house for Su’s parents in Cornwall. Rogers parted company with both Su and Foster in the late 60s.

He and Foster, the two architectural barons, rarely appear in any sentence unsupported by the phrase “friends and rivals”. Rogers says “we are rivals [only] in the eye of the public. It’s not a race or anything.” Foster, whose credits include the Swiss Re tower, better known as the Gherkin, Wembley Stadium, London City Hall and the Millennium Bridge has a huge practice with more than 250 architects. Rogers’s entire staff is barely 200. An architect at another big London firm says that Foster “wants to take over the world.” When I put that to Rogers he just laughs and says: “For me the fun is really in community – the office; being in places one want to be [rather than] where one has to go, things like that. The quality of life element is very important to us.”

We can’t all enjoy quite such an agreeable existence as Rogers. He is “very concerned about the gap between the poor and the rich getting out of all proportion. We have failed in a way in making it a more equal society.” How does he square that with his firm’s work on the Candy brothers’ One Hyde Park complex where apartments for the super-rich command prices up to £100 million? He says that 40 percent of the homes will be so-called affordable as they will at the massive Chelsea Barracks development which he is also doing for the Candy brothers.

The firm has also devised some eco homes in Milton Keynes that cost £60,000 to build and start at £200,000. He insists that building sustainable homes on a larger scale is feasible and denies that architects will avoid them because there is little money in them. “You can make money out of anything you want to make money out of.” It could be pointed out that it is easy for him to say that as his firm is not driven by relentless profit making. The constitution of the practice states that no director earns more than six times the lowest paid architect who has been at the firm two years.

Editor's choice

• Gordon Brown’s secret to stayin’ alive
• What’s up with Woody?
• Can Cannes get serious?