A Place for all People Read online

  A place for all people

  A place for all people

  life, architecture

  and the fair society

  Richard Rogers

  with Richard Brown

  Published in Great

  Britain in 2017 by

  Canongate Books

  Limited, 14 High Street,

  Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  Copyright © Richard Rogers 2017. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 78211 693 6

  eISBN 978 1 78211 694 3

  Designed by Graphic Thought Facility

  Other books by the same author:

  A Case for Modern Architecture: The Smallpeice Lecture 1989

  Architecture: A Modern View

  A New London with Mark Fisher

  Cities for a Small Planet with Philip Gumuchdjian

  Cites for a Small Country with Anne Power

  For Ruthie, the love of my life.

  Introduction

  1

  Early Influences

  2

  The Shock of the New

  3

  The Language of Architecture

  4

  Centre Georges Pompidou

  5

  Politics and Practice

  6

  Building in the City

  7

  Humanising the Institution

  8

  Layers of Life

  9

  Public Spaces

  10

  Citizenship and the Compact City

  11

  The Fair Society

  Reflections on the Future

  Chronology

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Image credits

  ‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.’

  John Cage

  Introduction

  ‘Are you sitting down, old man?’ Renzo Piano asked, when I picked up the phone (he is four years younger than me). I reassured him that I was. ‘We have won the Beaubourg competition,’ he explained. ‘The announcement is in Paris this evening. We have to be there but I can’t get away from Genoa; could the rest of you fly over from London?’

  We hardly had time to digest the news, let alone prepare for the dramatic change in our working lives that it heralded. My mother, who was gardening at her Wimbledon house, cried with joy when I told her of the news. John Young, Ruthie and I dashed around London collecting partners and passports – we had so little work on that people weren’t coming into the office – and made it over to Paris just in time to join the celebration dinner on a bateau-mouche on the Seine. Dressed variously in jeans, T-shirts, sneakers and miniskirts, and hardly speaking any French, we were catapulted into the cream of the French establishment where the women wore tiaras and evening dresses, and the men white ties, medals and sashes.

  It was July 1971; we were in our twenties and thirties. Over the past seven years, we had designed houses, pavilions and small factories, but this was a project on an entirely different scale – a major public building in the heart of Paris. We had built so little, but with the confidence that naivety allows, we believed we could change the world.

  The competition had been to design a cultural centre in a run-down inner city area, which would accommodate a library, an art gallery, and a centre for experimental music. We had responded with a design for a loose-fit, flexible structure, but at its heart was the public piazza, which would occupy half the site, and continue underneath the building and up its façade, on escalators and walkways. This would not be a temple to high culture; rather, it would be what our submission called ‘a place for all people, the young and the old, the poor and the rich, all creeds and nationalities, a cross between the vitality of Times Square and the cultural richness of the British Museum’, a place for two-way participation not passive consumption, a piece of urban infrastructure rather than a building, a project driven by social and political responsibility.

  These were strong political statements, but architecture is inescapably social and political. I have always believed that there is more to architecture than architecture. The first line of my practice’s constitution states: ‘Architecture is inseparable from the social and economic values of the individuals who practise it and the society which sustains it.’

  Our best buildings do not just arise from the requirements of the client, but seek to answer broader social questions. The Pompidou Centre brought culture into the public domain. The Lloyd’s Building was designed as a flexible machine for a financial marketplace, but also as a carefully considered expression of those activities, designed both for the user and for the enjoyment of the passer-by. The Bordeaux Law Courts that we built in the 1990s rethought the purpose of judicial architecture; they were designed to draw the public in and explain the role of justice in society, as a school of law, not a citadel of crime and punishment. The Welsh Assembly Building, completed a few years later, does more than accommodate a legislature. The ground floor is essentially an indoor piazza for public use, with cafes, meeting spaces and a gallery that enables citizens to view the assembly chamber, where their representatives make decisions. The Leadenhall Building is a 50-storey-high skyscraper, the highest in the City of London when it was completed in 2014. The first seven storeys are given over to an open piazza with no walls, from which escalators carry you up to the reception.

  Architecture creates shelter and transforms the ordinary. Architects are both scientists and artists, solving problems in three dimensions, using structure and materials to create scale and humanise space, capture the play of light and shadows, and make an aesthetic impact. From the primitive hut to the Athenian Agora, from medieval palace to city hall, from the street bench to the great piazza, architecture shapes our lives. Good architecture civilises and humanises, bad architecture brutalises.

  But architecture also structures cities with buildings and public spaces, all the defining inventions of civilisation. Cities are where human beings first came together, where we evolved from social to political animals – from pack to polis. The first cities were refuges, offering safety in numbers in a hostile world, but they soon grew into something more complex and creative. City dwellers came together to exchange ideas and goods, for the meeting of friends and strangers, for discussion, argument, trade and collaboration. In 6,000 years (only 100 lifetimes), cities have transformed human history, providing the foundation for an astonishing burst of creativity and discovery.

  Nearly four billion people live in cities today – half the world’s population and more people than lived on the entire planet in 1970 – and the speed of urbanisation is accelerating. By 2050, cities are expected to house two-thirds of the world’s population; in 1900 they housed just 13 per cent.1 Meanwhile, the gulf between the rich and the poor is widening, threatening civilised values. Well-designed, compact and socially just, cities are fundamental to tackling inequality and climate change – the two most serious challenges our planet faces.

  Architecture is social in another sense too. Apart from its impact, it is an inherently sociable activity, an exercise in collaboration. As an architect, I am not an abstract artist in front of a blank canvas, seeking the blinding flash of inspiration and creativity. Quite the opposite, my drawings are notoriously bad. We develop designs in a team, by questioning briefs, analysing context and constraint, considering social, physical and cul
tural impacts, defining problems and testing solutions.

  I have always been happiest working in a group; from the first gang of friends that I gathered as a teenager, to the brilliant architects who I have worked with since. The dyslexia that made me so hopeless at school also spurred me on to find different ways of making things happen, depending on and supporting others, reflecting our human nature.

  Architecture is enriched by the interplay between different disciplines, from sociology and philosophy, to engineering and horticulture, and most of all by the collaborations between an enlightened client, the community and a design team. These last few make ethical principles real, and their dynamism creates the most exciting moments and unexpected results.

  This book is not an autobiography, though it draws on my life. I have always been more interested in ideas and dialogue than in narrative, in the visual rather than the written, in the present and the future rather than the past.

  But, working on the exhibition Richard Rogers – Inside Out at the Royal Academy in the summer of 2013, I started to think about how my ideas, beliefs and values had been formed and influenced, by my colleagues, my family and my friends, and by the times I have lived through. I looked back at how they have found expression in my work, in completed projects and sketches, in public speeches and private conversations, in the way my architectural language has evolved, and the ways in which my architectural practice has grown.

  This book goes deeper in exploring my ideas and talking about the people who have inspired my work and informed my beliefs – in people and fairness; in places and streets that are designed for people, for democracy and openness; in buildings that create beauty through the aesthetic fulfilment of needs; in cities that are compact, adaptable, sustainable and humane.

  ‘A place for all people, the young and the old, the poor and the rich, all creeds and nationalities, a cross between the vitality of Times Square and the cultural richness of the British Museum.’

  Our vision for the Pompidou Centre, as expressed in our competition submission.

  It gathers together relationships, projects, collaborations and arguments, interweaving stories with case studies, drawings and photographs. It can be read in a number of ways. It is a mosaic, open-ended, more like jazz improvisation than an elegant and polished symphony.

  I hope this will give you something richer than a straightforward narrative; something that may inspire you to find your own ways of challenging and enhancing how we live on what remains a very small – and shrinking – planet.

  Inside Out, the 2013 Royal Academy exhibition of my life and work, which was the inspiration for this book.

  The view from the Florence apartment where I was born. It looked out over Filippo Brunelleschi’s Duomo, a high point of early Renaissance architecture and engineering.

  With my mother.

  1Early Influences

  Nothing comes from nothing. Our characters emerge from the accretion of experience (good and bad, of winning and losing) and the assimilation of influence. I don’t believe in the myth of the self-made man; we are influenced from the moment we’re born, by our parents and grandparents, by our friends, by education, geography and politics, by everything we see. It’s not a question of whether or not you are influenced, but of understanding the influences that your mind absorbs from the world around you as you grow, and of deciding how you will adopt and adapt them as the foundation stones of your thought and work.

  Influences are not destiny. But I was fortunate to first open my eyes in an elegant Florence apartment, flooded with light, filled with beautiful modernist furniture designed by my cousin Ernesto Rogers, and looking out towards the magnificent Duomo, an early fifteenth-century masterpiece by Brunelleschi, who was not just the first Renaissance architect, but also an engineer, a planner, a sculptor and a thinker. The unornamented expressive Duomo is, to me, the pinnacle of Renaissance architecture, better even than the masterworks of Michelangelo. I have always preferred the simpler expression and stripped-down energy of early Renaissance, early Gothic, early modern architecture, to the richer more decorative forms that appear as movements mature.

  And I always say that I chose my parents well. My father was a doctor with a rigorously enquiring scientific mind, while my mother was an art lover (and in later life a skilled potter), with a love of colour and form. These powerful influences blended with many others over the years.

  My parents, Dada

  Nino. Our Florence apartment was furnished with elegant modern pieces designed by my cousin Ernesto Rogers.

  Florence

  Florence is the city I know best. It is the birthplace and pinnacle of the European Renaissance, a city-state that created some of the great masterpieces of art and architecture, against a backdrop of turbulent and sometimes bloody power struggles, the home of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Donatello, Massaccio, Dante and Michelangelo. I left the city when I was five, so my early memories – of hills, domes, towers, rooftops, churches and streets – may not be entirely reliable. But Florence entered into my bloodstream, and has stayed with me as a template, an ideal, for what a city can be; the River Arno and the Ponte Vecchio, its beautiful inhabited bridge; the dialogue between medieval and Renaissance buildings in the Piazza della Signoria. I am constantly revisiting and deepening my relationship with the city of my birth, and with the friends and relatives who still live there. I still love showing Florence to visitors, as my father did in his time.

  My father, Nino, had been living in Florence since 1926, where he studied to become a doctor. Nino’s grandfather was English, but had trained as a dentist in Paris before settling in Venice – we still have a tin of his patented ‘fragrant tooth powder’. Dada, my mother, was the daughter of an architect and engineer, from a notable Trieste family. Nino and Dada had been friends since they were children and married in 1932. I was born a year later.

  My parents were products of the early twentieth century, of the great flowering of civic and cultural life that followed the unification of Italy. My father was a rationalist to the core, with a strong belief in the strength of the human spirit, and a determination to succeed; echoing Nietzsche, he wrote ‘My will is my god’ on the flyleaves of books. Nino was deeply interested in politics too, in democracy and in Florence’s history as a city-state – as a new Athens. I remember him talking me through an essay he had written on the guild system and how this had formed part of Florence’s early Renaissance period of citizen government.

  Reflecting his deep interest in his adopted city, Nino was perhaps more Florentine than Italian, just as I would still say that I come from Florence rather than from Italy. As Mussolini’s fascists tightened their grip in the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was good reason to question the value of allegiance to the Italian state. Nino had always been drawn to England, visiting the year before I was born to investigate working there as a doctor. The rise of the fascists forced my parents’ hand.

  Nino loved England as only a foreigner can. He prized classic English brands – Burberry raincoats, Dents gloves and Lotus shoes – and dressed as the epitome of the saying, ‘To be truly English, you have to be a foreigner.’ For him, it seemed an oasis of democracy and liberal values in an unstable world. English newspapers, Dickens and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories were his favoured reading, and my name was emphatically the English ‘Richard’, not the Italian ‘Riccardo’.

  Dada was more sceptical about the prospect of moving, more attached to Trieste, the town of her birth; although Trieste had only been part of Italy since the First World War, her family was comfortably established there. It had always been a cosmopolitan place, set on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for which it provided the only port, at that time, and looking more to Vienna than to Rome. Like many port cities, Trieste had its roots in commerce, not religion or military strength, so had a marginal and transitional character, filled with a minestrone of mysterious businessmen, writers and artists – including James Joyce, who taught my mother E
nglish.

  Though she was more modern in outlook, Dada’s family was more traditional than Nino’s, and more passionately Italian. Her parents lived in the neo-medieval castle Villa Geiringer built by her architect grandfather Eugenio together with a funicular railway that stopped at the Villa on its way uphill. Dada was passionate about art, with a brilliant eye for beauty. I remember her delight in taking me to see the Festival of Britain in 1951, and throughout her life she retained her enthusiasm for modern art, design, writing.

  I only discovered years later that both sides of the family were Jewish though Dada’s grandfather had converted to Christianity, and both she and Nino were atheists. When I asked my mother whether this was true, she replied, ‘Of course your roots are Jewish, but I’ve spent all my life getting away from religion.’ I accepted the answer at the time, but looking back there was clearly an element of reticence, and a reluctance to acknowledge that being Jewish is as much about culture as it is about religion.

  Choosing London

  By 1938, it had become clear that war was coming, and that my father would finally have to choose between his Italian home and the risk of internment or worse and his English passport (a legacy of his English grandfather). My parents chose England, and my privileged existence as a moderately spoilt firstborn Italian child in a comfortably bourgeois family came to an abrupt end. My father came over in late 1938, and my mother and I landed in England in October 1939, accompanied by my father’s brother Giorgio, a concert pianist, and a man as romantic as my father was rational. I remember him rehearsing Schubert and Chopin on a concert grand piano during the Blitz while I sat underneath hugging the legs.