The home of Richard Rogers and his wife, Ruth, in Chelsea, London, is deceptive. On the outside the three-story house looks conventional, built in the neoclassical stucco style that typifies great swathes of Chelsea and Belgravia.

Inside, however, the house is relentlessly modern and minimal, not to say uncomfortable. The front door, at the side, is reached across a slender bridge traversing a moat. The original outer walls remain, but just about everything else has been removed, leaving an enormous atrium from ground to roof in which bedrooms and bathrooms appear to have been hung from the walls. The long staircase is precariously built of steel with a narrow steel wire banister that offers a treacherous journey to the master bedroom.

If the character of an architect can be discerned more from the homes he lives in than the buildings for which he is famous, then Lord Rogers of River side’s home is a clue to the mind of a master of contemporary style. Lord Rogers offers a conventional, even conservative facade, but the veneer disguises an altogether more colorful and interesting past.

Until this week, few New Yorkers had heard of Lord Rogers and the series of extraordinary and fashion-changing buildings by which he is known in Europe. He is as obscure here as Frank Gehry was in Europe before he built the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Lord Rogers’s contribution to architecture is undoubted. From the Centre Pompidou in Paris, known commonly as the Beaubourg, which tore apart George Haussmann’s stultifying uniformity, through the Lloyd’s Building in the City of London and beyond, Lord Rogers’s trademark has been of turning buildings inside out.

The cumbersome muddle of facilities, such as elevators, toilets, ventilation, and water pipes, that architects had until then disguised behind walls and atop roofs, he boldly strapped onto the outside of his structures. The effect is startling, as if an oil drilling platform had been parked at the end of a street.

Considering Lord Rogers’s fame, it has taken a surprising amount of time for him to be awarded a significant building project in New York. He applied to build the Freedom Tower at ground zero, but the job was awarded to Daniel Libeskind.

But now a string of Rogers buildings await construction in the city. He has been hired to remodel the Jacob K. Javits Center. He is overseeing the development of Silvercup Studios in Queens. He has also been commissioned by Mayor Bloomberg to revamp the East River frontage from Battery Park to the Lower East Side.

That is, he was busily at work on the New York projects until questions were raised this week about his suitability for the task when it became known he had hosted a meeting of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. The group is considering a proposal to impose a boycott of architectural jobs in Israel, particularly of the security wall and new Israeli settlements.

(Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s dry response to the putative boycott was, “Anything which prevents modern architecture in Israel should be counted as a blessing.”)

Lord Rogers’s father, Nino Rogers, was a medical doctor of Jewish descent who lived with his aristocratic wife Dada, from Trieste, in an opulent home in Florence, with a roof terrace affording spectacular views of Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome, a vision which must surely have inspired the young Richard.

In 1938, when Lord Rogers was five, the family abandoned everything and fled from Fascist Italy to London. Dada Rogers, who had surrounded herself with objects from the modern movement and the Bauhaus, wanted an ultra-modern home, which years later her son was to design for her.

Richard Rogers won a place at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, before transferring to Yale University’s world famous architecture department in 1962. There he met Norman Foster and between them they set up Team 4, specializing in high-tech modern designs that stretched the use of materials.

Among his early work was the Jaffa house outside London, which Stanley Kubrick made famous by including it in “A Clockwork Orange.” Since then he has specialized in striking, landmark buildings, such as the Millennium Dome in London, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the National Assembly for Wales building, opened this week by Queen Elizabeth.

In 2000 he was ennobled by Tony Blair and became a notable figure in the New Labor establishment, part of a parade of arts and sports figures which marked the revival of the spirit of the Swinging Sixties that came with the first blush of Blair’s government. And Lord Rogers remains largely a Sixties figure, liberal, progressive and committed, in principal at least, to radical causes.

His association with Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, however, may prove a step too far for his New York paymasters. What is hard to fathom is how such a cosmopolitan figure, who spends time in New York and graduated from nearby Yale, came to ignore the reckless risk he took by consorting with a group so hostile to Israel.

His second wife Ruth, who is also a fashionable London figure, presiding over the smart River Cafe overlooking the Thames at Hammersmith, is Jewish and was born an American. Did she not spare a moment to think how the news of the putative Israel boycott would go down among her friends and relations in New York?