Jonathan Morrison
Richard Rogers: I offered to debate with Prince Charles, but he won’t do it
The architect has battled umbrellas and the ‘primitive viewpoint’ of the Prince of Wales. He looks back on his legacy
Baron Rogers of Riverside learnt early in his career that no building can please everyone, all of the time. When the Pompidou Centre in Paris was unveiled in 1977, he allowed himself a moment to savour the project that would make his name. And as he stood outside, on a rainy day, he recalls he was approached by “a nice lady” out of the grey.
“She asked me what I thought of it and I stupidly said that I had built it,” he says. “So she hit me over the head with her umbrella. I sympathised — she had been used to the area looking a certain way all her life and what was I, a foreigner, doing by destroying it?”
The Pompidou, designed with Renzo Piano, the Genoese architect who created the Shard and who still stays at Rogers’s capacious Chelsea home when in London, proved an immediate success, attracting more visitors than the Louvre and Eiffel Tower combined.
Yet it had been a battle to get it built. There were numerous attempts to derail the scheme, which almost single-handedly ushered in a new style known as “high-tech”, though at the time some labelled it “bowellism” on account of the bowels — pipes, vents and escalators — being placed on the outside. There were hostile articles, a campaign group was set up solely to bring lawsuits, and the widow of the abstract painter Robert Delaunay said she would rather burn his paintings than have them exhibited inside the building. Despite having won an international design competition, at one point the pair even had to go to court to overturn a Vichy-era law that prevented foreigners creating cultural buildings in France. “Renzo and I had to stand up and promise to be good boys,” Rogers recalls.
The Pompidou Centre in Paris (SYLVAIN SONNET/GETTY IMAGES)
While he had proved that he was hardly afraid of controversy, his next big commission — Lloyd’s of London — triggered a similar reaction, and after a “ferocious press attack” almost no one was invited to the opening. He was close to giving up.
“Luckily I met the Dean of St Paul’s there,” says Rogers, clad in an eye-watering combination of collarless turquoise shirt and purple braces. “He asked me if I was feeling beleaguered. Yes, I sure was. And then he told me the story of how Sir Christopher Wren, in his seventies, had to erect an 18ft-high wattle fence around St Paul’s to hide what he was building from the public.”
It is a parable that has stayed with him, and one that gets an airing whenever his occasional spats with the Prince of Wales are mentioned. If Wren was considered too modern for his time, who is the prince to insist that architects should only build in a classical style?
“It’s a pretty primitive viewpoint,” Rogers says firmly. “But Charles is powerful and I’ve had many a building stopped by [his influence]. If it’s not his field, he shouldn’t be making statements about it — it does undermine the role of royalty in the 21st century.”
The Lloyd's building in London (GETTY IMAGES)
Rogers, the winner of the 2007 Pritzker prize and two Stirling prizes, points to his scheme for the site of the former Chelsea Barracks in London, which was scrapped by the Qatari developers in 2009 after the prince approached the emirate’s ruling family — resulting in the loss of several jobs and, as Rebel Prince, the recent biography of Charles by Tom Bower, recounts, nearly landing Charles in court for inducing a breach of contract.
Rogers believes the prince also intervened in Mies van der Rohe’s proposal for a skyscraper at the No 1 Poultry site in the City of London, as well as, famously, a daring extension to the National Gallery, neither of which went ahead. In a speech at Hampton Court, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institution of British Architects in 1984, the Prince described Peter Ahrend’s design as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend”, effectively sealing its demise.
The row between the two has been simmering ever since and, in his recent biography/manifesto, A Place for All People, Rogers accuses the prince of blacklisting those he disagrees with. He had asked “major developers” about the role of the prince. “Only one of them said he actually showed the prince the designs, but five others said they consulted Clarence House about a shortlist of architects,” he wrote.
“As a developer your job is to minimise risk,” he explains. “So I understand why they do it. Of the ten top developers, the majority will consult with the prince, or his institutions, in case they object. Well that’s not very democratic, is it?
“I’ve offered to debate with him, only to be told, ‘The prince will not debate.’ He doesn’t understand architecture if he thinks it is fixed at one point in the past. Architecture always seems modern in its time, if it’s any good. Wren proved that.”
Rogers’s rolling laugh reverberates around his office on top of the Leadenhall Building, the right-angled triangle that is his latest voluminous contribution to the capital’s skyline. Across from Lloyd’s, it makes the insurance market, with its soaring crystal atrium, look small. The gap between the two may be no more than a few metres, but it spans nearly 40 years of architectural history. What seems incredible is that the high-tech style that Rogers ushered in — with help from compatriots Norman Foster, designer of the nearby “Gherkin”, and Nicholas Grimshaw, the man behind the Eden Project in Cornwall — has never really gone away. It is now the vernacular of capitalism and culture alike: refined, certainly, but never replaced.
How different it could have been. Rogers recently surprised many by leading a campaign to save Robin Hood Gardens, a housing estate in east London that had become a byword for lawlessness and deprivation by the time he was working on Lloyd’s (between 1976 and 1986). Before the Pompidou and Lloyd’s, modernist architecture — then mostly concrete and brutalism — had seemed to be in its prolonged death throes. He and Piano found the way out.
Richard Rogers was born in Florence in 1933 into an Anglo-Italian family, but the family were forced to return to England in 1938 and Rogers endured a difficult public-school education, leaving in 1951 without A-levels as a result of severe dyslexia. After National Service in Trieste (he speaks fluent Italian), architecture proved his salvation and he studied under Peter Smithson, one of the designers of Robin Hood Gardens. He then travelled to Yale on a Fulbright scholarship with his first wife, Su Brumwell, the mother of three of his five sons (one of whom died after a seizure in 2011, but four survive, along with 13 grandchildren), where he met Norman Foster. The three of them, with Wendy Cheeseman, later created the Team 4 practice.
“When I was young, I was called stupid,” he reveals. “My life was dictated by the fact that I wanted to be second bottom of the class, not bottom. I couldn’t be a doctor and all my family are doctors — so probably the arts benefited from this. I’m just proud when I can occasionally remember the right words.”
Maggie's Centre in London (ALAMY)
Campaigning to save an example of the style he buried — despite the personal connection — is merely one of many contradictions. He is a multimillionaire who believes in higher taxation, a peer of the realm who believes the House of Lords is an anachronism, a former adviser to Ken Livingstone who builds temples to Mammon (he has met Jeremy Corbyn only once). Even the subsidised works canteen that his second wife, Ruth Rogers, set up somehow became the eye-wateringly expensive River Café, where sous-chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall could cut their teeth.
“Life is always changing,” he says. “We adapt. But fairness is the critical thing. If you live in the gutter and can’t get proper housing, if you have learning difficulties, which I have, and can’t get help, then it’s not fair.”
It’s not every architect who will risk the wrath of Prince Charles, at least so publicly, but Rogers has always been political and was raised “as a good lefty”. He has also always been a fighter — a characteristic, refined by learning boxing, that he credits with his survival at boarding school. He has clearly lost none of his pugnaciousness, although he claims that wife, “Ruthie”, is far more of an activist; she has returned to her native America that day to march against the Second Amendment: the right to carry arms.
“I chose the right parents,” he says. “I was born to a doctor, Nino, and a mother, Dada, who was a potter; I was born in Florence, not Sudan. There’s a lot of luck in this game and you do the best you can with the luck you’ve been given. But when 40 per cent of the world’s population don’t have a proper roof over their heads and when the eight richest Americans have as much money as the poorest half of the world, there’s something wrong. Taxation has to be fair.”
Has he mentioned this to his former business partner, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, who has since moved to Switzerland for more than just the cheese? “I’ve had this conversation with him. We need to stop allowing people to leave for small islands too.”
Yet beyond taxation, what he cares about most is housing. He remains president of the National Communities Resource Centre, which supports residents in low-income areas, and his voice becomes a shout when the Grenfell Tower disaster is mentioned. “Skyscrapers per se are not bad,” he exclaims. “Of course we can make them fireproof — you don’t hear of rich people dying in fires. It’s the poor who suffer; surprise, surprise. And because they were poor, no one listened to them grumbling about safety.
“The housing crisis is just appalling. We should be ashamed of the rate of building, but developers have been put in control and they have shareholders, and the fewer houses they build, the more money they make.”
Isn’t his only brother, Peter, a developer? A founder member of Lipton Rogers, the firm that commissioned one of his few turkeys — the One Hyde Park complex, beloved of oligarchs?
“He’s an engineer, not developer,” he says, a little disingenuously. “We’re quite close, and I don’t think they’re all baddies — you need developers and he’s one of the best. But they shouldn’t have so much control and that’s something that needs to be addressed by the government.
“Architecture is social, not cultural — its first duty is to serve society. I feel strongly we should all swear, as the Greeks did, to leave our cities more beautiful than when we entered. Not just in terms of aesthetics, but the quality of life.”
As his book reveals, once upon a time, working abominable hours on Creek Vean, a house in Cornwall, he had wondered whether he was cut out to be an architect. He has suffered more brickbats than most. Yet at the age of 84, he still travels to the office every day. His PA grumbles good-naturedly about his energy. So has he made his peace with the profession at last?
“I just like to build,” he says. “I’ve realised that’s really all I can do. And at least no one’s likely to attack me with an umbrella these days.”
Rogers’s top 5 designs
Pompidou Centre, Paris (completed 1977, with Renzo Piano)
Selected out of 681 entries to an international design competition — the first to be run in France — this iconoclastic design turned conventional notions of design upside down as well as inside out. With nearly 180 million visitors since its opening, it has certainly endured in popularity.
Lloyd’s of London (1986)
The unwitting symbol of the City’s Big Bang and the arrival of American-style free-market economics, the Lloyd’s building was listed as grade I in 2011, becoming the youngest structure to achieve this status. A raw masterpiece, with one of the most astonishing atriums in the world, it seems as fresh today as it did in the era of red braces, braying Sloanes and brick-like mobiles.
The Millennium Dome, London (1999)
As controversial as the Garden Bridge at the time, the Dome came in on time and under budget — which can’t be said of the rubbish it was filled with. It has since enjoyed an illustrious second life as a popular concert and events venue.
Barajas Airport Terminal 4, Madrid (2006)
Rogers deservedly won the Stirling prize for his wood-panelled and brightly lit temple to air travel, which almost makes flying Iberia a pleasant experience. Heathrow’s enormous Terminal 5 building, which opened a mere two years later, would confirm Rogers’s mastery of complex transport interchanges.
Maggie’s Centre, London (2008)
Rogers scooped his second Stirling for this warm refuge for cancer patients at Charing Cross Hospital, which is based on the concept of a heart protected by thick walls. Hardly the grandest of his projects, but arguably the most important and, typically, the £20,000 prize money was donated to the centre.
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