Colour, Structure, Movement.
These might seem arbitrary words but these are some of the best ones to describe the architecture
of Richard Rogers. In a career spanning decades, he created some of the most applauded and equally
hated buildings, that might even have redefined what architecture means to the public at large.
But how does a child who can’t even draw or read properly grow up to become one of the
most well known architects in the world. To know the story of Richard Rogers is to
know a story of a sad childhood, a story of collaboration, a story of trying to define
a new style of architecture, even a story of a public feud with the Prince of Wales.
Welcome to Blessedarch and today on this channel, we are exploring the life of Richard Rogers.
His story began in Florence in 1933.
At the time of his birth, his father, William Nino Rogers, was a medical student. His mother
was from Trieste, and was a former pupil of the famed Irish writer James Joyce. She had great
interest in modern design and encouraged her son’s interest in the visual arts. Now Florence might be
one of the beautiful places one can imagine living in but that wasn’t the case in 1938.
When Richard was just 5 years old, with war looming, his family left Italy
which was under Mussolini at the time and arrived in London. London during those years was cold and
smoggy and this was a time of rationing. For Rogers this was a complete cultural shock.
In his autobiography he recalled how his ‘“Life switched from colour to black-and-white”. Maybe
this was also a reason why his whole life as an architect was filled with vibrant colours
because somehow his youngers years in London were robbed of them. The problem was not just
they had they moved to a new city, but also that their life had been completely toppled. The family
had been comfortably middle class in Italy but the relocation had reduced them to a single-room flat.
A young Richard was sent to a new school in the UK and things were not great there as well.
What nobody knew at the time, including Richard, his teachers and even his parents
was that Richard was dyslexic. At the time there wasn’t ever enough awareness for dyslexia,
in his own words, he described how the condition was just called stupidity.
When he reflected back on those times, he said ‘I was miserable, “crying myself to sleep
every night – years of unhappiness”. So his younger days were mostly grim and depressing,
however one silver lining that came from his experiences was that, he learned to work with
people quite well and he realized there was more strength in working as a group
than being a solo high achiever, and this was an outlook he maintained throughout his architectural
career. When he turned 80 years in age, the Royal Academy prepared a retrospective exhibition
and the curators admitted that they struggled to find a single drawing by the man himself.
Collaboration was such an intrinsic part of who he was, and the kind of practice he had created,
and all of that came from his childhood. After his school ended he went on to join
the military for two years. Towards the end of his military service, he spent some time in Trieste,
the same place his mother was from, and got to know the work of his cousin
Ernesto Rogers. Ernesto was working as an architect and after spending some
time with him & looking at his work, Richard decided to pursue a career in architecture
and to begin his journey he enrolled at the AA in Lodon.
Now as Richard Rogers himself used to recall, he wasn’t really good at architectural drawing.
And this was also evident to the teachers at the AA. This is an early report form his chool
and it reads : "His designs will continue to suffer while his drawing is so bad,
his method of work so chaotic and his critical judgment so inarticulate." Notice the only
subject he passed in was Services. But a lot of his teachers came around by his final year.
In his final presentation he impressed the examiners
with his design of a school and even won an award for this. After he graduated from AA,
In the year 1960 Richard married his first wife Susan Brumwell. And the following year,
as he won a scholarship to Yale the young couple went off to the United States.
Rogers was deeply impressed when he docked in New York. "The boat arrived at dawn and
I remember going on deck and being absolutely shocked and awed at the change of scale, from
toy-town England to this immense steel structure of high-rise buildings. You had great canyons all
the way down. I'd never seen anything like it." Studying at Yale was a defining time for Richard.
Not only was he taught by Paul Rudolph but it was at Yale he met his future partner,
a lifelong friend and an architect who also went on to become one of the most
well known in the world, Norman Foster. While studying in the US, Richard and
Norman became good friends and they developed an interest in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.
So during college Richard , Susan, Norman and another American student
made a number of trips across the continent seeing as many of Wright’s buildings as possible.
They also went on to explore the works of Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn. After completing
his degree at Yale, Richard briefly worked at the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill or SOM. And this
job provided one of the most uselful lessons to Richard. “I quickly came to realise,” he wrote,
“that working in someone else’s architectural practice was not for me.” He realised that
it was time to start his own practice. When they returned to England, Richard and
Norman with wife Susan, and Wendy Cheeseman formed Team 4 as their first architectural practice.
Their first significant commission was Creek Vean, a home for Su’s parents. Wedged into the Cornish
rocks, Creek Vean’s form was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses. It looked modern but was
built using traditional materials and techniques that were very different from the hi-tech
modernism with which both Rogers and Foster were later associated. Designing that house was a steep
learning curve. It took six years and a lot of investment from the client. Soon after the house
was completed, In 1967, the team broke up and Richard and Norman went on to create their own
firms. But even though they went their separate ways they still remained the closest of Friends.
Post the dissolution of Team 4 , Richard created his own firm started to work on a few projects,
but little did he know his life was about to change forever. In 1968,
he met the Italian architect Renzo Piano with whom he shared an interest in developing a
flexible and anti-monumental architecture. Very soon Piano became a partner, and the
name of the firm changed to Piano + Rogers. And Soon after came the project that changed
both of their lives and the trajectory of their careers forever. The Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In 1969 French president, Georges Pompidou, announced a competition for a new cultural centre
on the vacant site of the Plateau Beaubourg in Paris. Richard and Renzo entered the competition
that saw more than 600 participants from all around the world. They dreamt up the
most radical proposal of their lives. Their scheme for the Centre Pompidou was
to be a great oil refinery of art. They wanted to create a new kind of robotic architecture
that would respond to changing needs, with plug-in components and moving floors. One of the primary
concepts within this structure was exposing all of the infrastructure of the building.
The skeleton itself would engulf the building from its exterior, showing all the different
mechanical and structure systems not only so that they could be understood but also to maximize the
interior space without interruptions. Huge digital screens would entertain crowds on a great sloping
piazza outside, while escalators in glass tubes would shuttle people up the building’s facade,
forming a dynamic backdrop to the mime artists and musicians down below. This new building
was to be filled with colour. Its exposed pipes and ducts painted in the bright reds,
blues and greens of the media age – a feature that would continue in Rogers’s work for years to come.
The point of it, well he said that “culture should be fun”. Many famous architects had
entered this competition, but against all odds purely on the strength of their ideas,
the duo won the competition. But with the widespread accolades came the widespread hatred.
The architects were booed at the press conference, where balls of paper were thrown at them.
But inspite of Public outcry the construction of the project went ahead. There were also many
hurdles that came while executing this project. Pompidou died and his successor cut the budget.
The screens were dropped, the floors did not move and fire regulations curtailed some of the most
daring ideas. Pressure groups filed lawsuits against the project, the Guardian’s art critic
said the “hideous” object should be covered with Virginia creeper, while an artist’s widow said
that she would rather burn his paintings than have them exhibited in the building.
But even though huge masses of people spoke out about how much they hated the building,
something completely spectacular happened once the project was opened to the public.
Visitor numbers were five times those predicted. Around seven million people
visited in the first year, more than the Louvre and Eiffel Tower combined. The project was an
instant success and it propelled both the architects to the limelight on a world stage.
Despite the success, The partnership between Renzo and Richard was short lived. In 1978, the two
went about their separate ways, and Richard’s new practice was now called Richard Rogers Partnership
which ofcourse later renamed to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Although once again even
though the two partners separated, Richard and Renzo continued to be the best of friends.
The Pompidou center laid out what Rogers work would be from now now. Structure would now be
exposed, colours would be striking. The ambition was to make buildings lighter and more flexible,
to minimise structure while maximising space and light, and reduce demands on energy and the
natural environment. If Pompidou center thrust him into the limelight, it was his next project that
solidified his design style. I am ofcourse talking about The Lloyd’s building. Completed in 1986,
it is another inside-out building, a looming tower finished in polished metal. Formed of
three towers around a 60-metre high atrium, lit by a huge barrel-vaulted glass roof, its most radical
move was to place the service cores outside the building. Lifts, staircases air-conditioning ducts
all on the outside. This freed up more floorspace insode, and provided Rogers with a chance
to revel in the sculptural forms of staircases, glass lifts and toilet pods on the façade.
It was received with similar mix of applause and stern criticism as seen in center Pompidou.
However many still recognize it as one of the most significant buildings of the 20th century.
What is amazing here is That Rogers was able to persuade the both the conservatives of Paris
and the people of Lloyd's to commission such extraordinary structures. And Richard Rogers
was now one of the most well known architects in the world. He now got newer & bigger commissions,
but with this new found celebrity, he also found new celebrity critics. Perhaps none more vocal and
well know as the Prince of Wales, Price Charles. In a series of high-profile speeches throughout
the 1980s, the Prince of Wales launched a tirade of attacks on modern architecture.
In a speech to the Corporation of London’s planning committee in 1987, he said: “You have
ladies and gentleman to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings,
it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.” The Luftwaffe for those of
you who don’t know was the aerial-warfare branch of Germany before and during World War II. The
pair clashed again in 2009 when the Prince wrote to the Emir of Qatar, who owned Chelsea Barracks,
to protest at Rogers' plans for redeveloping the site. He once even challenged Prince Charles,
as reported by the guardian, to engage in public debate over Britain’s built environment.
Despite the stern opposition Rogers went on to create even more structures that kept changing
the skyline of London Like the Leadenhall Building & even to the millennium dome.
But Richard’s contribution to London was not just restricted to architecture
but also spread into its Urban design. In the year 1998, he was appointed by
the Deputy Prime Minister to chair the UK Government’s Urban Task Force. His vision
was that cities of the future “will no longer be zoned as today in isolated one-activity ghettos;
rather they will resemble the more richly layered cities of the past. Living, working, shopping,
learning, and leisure will overlap and be housed in continuous, varied and changing structures.”
With the establishment of the Greater London Authority in 2000, and the election of Ken
Livingstone as the first mayor of London, Rogers was appointed to head up the new
Architecture and Urbanism Unit or A+UU, charged with improving design quality in the capital.
The A+UU published design guides on streetscape, housing, density and green scape, mapped high
streets and town centres to identify opportunities for infill development, and launched a plan for
100 new public spaces across London. Only a few of these flagship projects were ever completed,
but the A+UU played an influential role in putting design at top of London’s political agenda.
Over the years, Richard Rogers has created a plethora of projects that might leave you
with very strong emotions. Whether they emotions will be pleasant or unpleasant,
you might only know when you come truly face to face with his work.
After decades of working as a partner in the firm, Richard Rogers finally retired in the year 2020.
And just one year later on 18th December, 2021, he passed away.
In the year 2007, selected by a jury that included Shigeru Ban, Balkrishna Doshi,
Rolf Fehlbaum & Frank Gehry among other names, Richard Rogers was awarded the Pritzker Prize.
His speech included the following lines It was Milan Kundera who said
“history looks sunlit, clear, and obvious only in hindsight”. The same could be said of any career,
including my own. Looking back I realize that it is the people I have worked with—not
just architects, but enlightened clients, and brilliant engineers who have taught me the most.
Hey guys I hope you enjoyed that documentary on the life and designs of Richard Rogers. Ofcourse
there is much more to explore in his designs and maybe I will make a separate video for them.
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