The Way Forward

Richard Rogers is surely the most misunderstood architect in Britain. Since his “people’s palace,” the Centre Pompidou (designed with Renzo Piano), opened in 1977 in Paris, Rogers has shown a commitment to improving the public realm matched by few architects working at his level of international acclaim. To advance his ideas about city planning, he became that rarest of species, the architect as politician, winning influence among those with the power to make things happen. He has made no secret of the passionate left-wing convictions that underpin his ideas about the social responsibility of architecture. His enemies in Britain’s right-wing press ignore the sensible, life-affirming proposals in his books, Cities for a Small Planet and Cities for a Small Country, and paint him as an egotist—“Lord Trendy Billionaire Rogers,” the columnist A. N. Wilson gibed—who wants to impose his misguided, Modernist, glass-and-steel vision on a public that supposedly detests everything about it.

I was warned when I met Rogers in early June that only one subject was off-limits. At the time, Rogers’s multi-billion-dollar mixed-use project for Qatari Diar, the development arm of the Qatari government, on the site of the former Chelsea Barracks, in London, was under fire from Prince Charles, who has infuriated British architects by using his position to speak out against modern architecture. In 1984 the prince criticized a proposed extension to the National Gallery (not by Rogers) as a “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend.” That verbal demolition caused lasting offense. More recently, the monarch-in-waiting wrote to the Qatari royal family, urging them to drop Rogers’s design and instead use a classical one by Quinlan Terry. At the client’s request, the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) Web site contained no reference to design details of the Chelsea Barracks project, and Rogers had been asked not to talk about it. I suggested to him that Britain still has a conservative, traditional wing in architecture. “Lately, it’s come out rather strongly,” he said drily, looking relaxed in one of his trademark collarless lime-green shirts.

Ten days later, Qatari Diar withdrew its planning application. Two and a half years’ work developing the project had come to nothing, and Rogers was incensed. This was at least the third time that Prince Charles had intervened to block one of his firm’s projects. In 1987 he attacked Rogers’s proposals for Paternoster Square, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral, in a public speech, and the plans were scrapped. A scheme to rebuild the Royal Opera House also fell apart after the prince let the royal displeasure be known. “I was basically told: ‘the prince does not like you,’” Rogers complained in the Guardian, demanding an inquiry into this new meddling. “The prince does not debate and in a democracy that is unacceptable and in fact is non-constitutional.” This drew a malicious attack from the Daily Mail: “Next month, [Rogers] will be 76. But instead of being mellowed by age, his contempt for those who disagree with him seems to have intensified an arrogance that is his defining characteristic.”

It is hard to square this arrogant, overbearing, Howard Roarkian caricature with the man I met at RSHP’s headquarters in Hammersmith, London, next to the River Thames. Before Rogers arrived, Ivan Harbour and Graham Stirk—senior directors at the firm—enthused about the practice’s atelier work style and “big family” atmosphere. Every Monday, Rogers holds an informal design forum that is open to everyone. The staff discusses the latest competitions and projects already under way; the aim is to encourage fresh perspectives and new ideas. “What’s fascinating about Richard is that the organization he has set up allows contribution,” Harbour says.

We talked in a meeting room barely big enough for a table—the usual accoutrements of power seemed to count for little. This is a practice that puts the architect’s social responsibility at the heart of the firm and at every level of the organization. RSHP is owned by a charitable trust, and Rogers is far from being a billionaire; his share in the company is worth one pound. The directors’ salaries are fixed at no more than six times the net income of RSHP’s lowest paid architect (who has been registered and on staff for at least two years), and Rogers’s is nine times this amount. RSHP shares profits, after reserves and taxes, with all staff members and donates a percentage to charities. Staff benefits are generous. After a year’s service, for instance, the firm pays women on maternity leave their full salary for up to a year. (The British legal requirement is six weeks at 90 percent of earnings, followed by 33 weeks at about $200 a week.)

Stirk and Harbour get equal billing with Rogers in the new company name. Rogers hopes there will be continuity after he’s gone. “The idea is that the knowledge we’ve built up and stored over this vast length of time continues and is of ‘benefit’—inverted commas—to society,” he says.

If this sounds surprisingly self-deprecating, Rogers cuts an affable, laid-back figure. He smiles constantly, laughs easily, talks in a fast and not always audible slur, and looks like a man full of zest for the best things life has to offer. The canteen next to our meeting room is the firm’s social hub, and Rogers’s wife, Ruth, co-owns the renowned River Café next door to the RSHP building. Born in Florence, Rogers takes August off, in the Italian fashion, and once a year the whole office goes away on a trip. In 2008 it was to the Protos winery near Valladolid, Spain, a project that won a European Award from the Royal Institute of British Architects and was designed by RSHP. “We all learned lots about wine,” he chuckles.

The “arrogance” that infuriates Rogers’s detractors is really the conviction that architects have an informed basis for their views. “People working in offices have a much greater consciousness of how their high-quality, standardized office should be organized,” Rogers says. “But immediately [when] they go out of their office, they have absolutely no understanding.” Crucial decisions about the built environment are often made by people unaware of what constitutes progressive practice.