Maryan Florio Rogers, The Des Moines Architect (1988-2132)
Born to Felicity Amato, a ballroom dancer, and Spencer Sognatore Rogers, an Italian restauranteur specializing in fusion tacos, Maryan Florio Rogers was an Iowa-based architectural revivalist known for her longstanding feud with the entire country of Portugal. Her efforts to develop the Neo-Mid-Century Modern Architectural Boom popular in the late 21st century earned her a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Buckwheat Singh.
Raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Rogers was well known for her youthful interests in design. At the age of four, she designed and successfully showcased the Iowa 7, a fashion series based on interpretations of Iowa’s most significant architectural designs, including the Eagle Point Park Shelters, the High Trestle Trail Bridge, the American Enterprise Group Corporate Headquarters, and Albert Tilbin’s barn in What Cheer, among others. Some of these designs were picked up by Iowa-based fashion firms, including the Freegate Group.
Though Rogers showed an interest in fashion at an early age, she would eventually show a greater aptitude for building design in her pre-teen and teen years. Between 1996-2005, she won nine regional LEGO Design Championships in the Architecture category, three of which led her to successful national championships. These successes eventually earned her a full ride scholarship to Cornell University, where she was accepted into the Architecture, Art, and Planning program, first as an undergraduate student and later, in 2011, as a graduate student.
Rogers was an exceptional student. However, she gained a reputation for her radical approach to architecture, which involved a near violent rejection of structural expressionism. Her remarks on this subject in the Cornell Journal of Architecture eventually led to renowned Portuguese architect Duarte Ferreira declaring Rogers “persona non grata”; Portugal eventually issued a travel ban on Rogers with no end date or explanation.
After graduating from college in 2015 with a degree in Architectural Theory and Design, Rogers gained employment at the National Institute of Architectural Reform in Des Moines and became one of the major proponents of the Revivalism strain of architectural theory (see the Architecture Revival of the 21st Century). For the first ten years of her employment, she established the foundations of her architectural theory based on reinterpretations of Le Corbusier, Erskine, van der Rohe, and Glass, among others, and published several early essays in Design Studies and the Journal of Architectural Revivalism.
In 2025, NIAR was commissioned to design a new U.S. headquarters for Pete’s Tortilla Emporium, a global food technology firm which sought to reduce its tax burden by moving out of the developing neo-socialist state of New Mexico. Rogers was assigned as the lead on the project and designed the first Neo-Mid-Century building of the 21st-century. Ground for the 48-story Grand Avenue Center (often called the Minecraft Sword) was broken in 2027, and the building was complete and operational by 2030. Upon its official opening, The Des Moines Register reported that a crowd spontaneously gathered outside of its doors and remained there for three hours before quietly dispersing; it is still not known what compelled the crowd to do this, though it is speculated that reflections from the building’s windows may have caused a form of mass psychogenic calmness.
Though widely hailed for its inventive reimagining of the mid-century modern form of design in the United States, Rogers became the subject of aggressive criticism from the Portuguese government; believed her efforts were designed to shame the entirety of Portugal, which was, by 2030, dominated by the Organic Brutalist Architecture movement (see Brutalism in the 21st Century). Rogers, however, hadn’t thought of Portugal since it had issued a travel ban against her in 2014 and only discovered the country’s disdain for her work after a journalist for the New York Times asked her about it during an interview. From then on, Rogers would periodically issue public criticism of Portugal’s 21st century architectural designs with what media critic Paul Ogden called “the most blatant trolling in architectural history.” To this date, Portugal continues to despise Rogers without any awareness that almost nothing Rogers has said about the country could be deemed as honest.
Rogers would spend the next thirty-five years designing new buildings and developing a theory for Neo-Mid-Century Modern Architecture. Her influence eventually led to the Boom period, which included completions of Rogers’ Corpus Colossus and Simon’s Cowl designs and the rise of NMCM architects such as Franz Wattpad and Tiffany Kovalchuk.
In 2100, Rogers retired to a farm in what was then the Free Republic of Nebraska (see the Nebraska Rebellion of December 2099). She would spend the remainder of her years working on a book of her designs, which she intended to release posthumously. Rogers died quietly in her sleep in 2132. Designs to Make Portugal Weep was released by Gestalten in 2133; it was immediately banned in Portugal, though Portuguese translations have been periodically air dropped in Lisbon every summer since.