The Richard Rogers Partnership, it was an-nounced last week, is to design one of the remaining towers on the World Trade Center site. I went to talk to Lord Rogers in his sun-filled, hollowed-out, hybrid high-tech/historic Chelsea home. He leans back slightly, almost awkwardly, in his Le Corbusier chunky chair, as if to sigh: “Where do we start?” Good question, even if he only implies it. This is quite a moment for the 72-year-old architect, who has been for so long one of Britain’s most diligent and articulate cultural figures.
Lord Rogers’ international reputation was made with the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The building was the first to realise the radical agenda of 1960s utopian high-tech, a structure with its bones and guts exposed, allowing the space inside to remain uncluttered and flexible, its snaking escalators ingesting a willing public. Lord Rogers’ Genoese co- architect, Renzo Piano, is also moving towards international omnipresence: his Morgan Library recently opened in mid-town Manhattan and his New York Times Building is emerging on Times Square.
“Before we built the Beaubourg [he always refers to the Pompidou by its original name] Renzo and I were unemployed. When we finished it we were unemployed again. This is the best period we have ever had,” he says.
He isn’t kidding. Do we begin with the recently completed Welsh Parliament, a building required to embody the spirit of a nation? Or the ambitious Antwerp Law Courts? Or perhaps with Barrajas Airport in Madrid, for a time the biggest construction project on the continent and now one of its few beautiful airports? Or perhaps Heathrow’s long-gestating Terminal Five (another contender for biggest building site), which will at last bring relief to the world’s busiest passenger airport in a scheme that seems to be coming in, astonishingly, on time and on budget? But, on the day after the announcement of the WTC coup, I felt it would be wrong to start anywhere but New York.
Lord Rogers has done what so many Brits have failed to do: he has broken into the US. He is inundated with Manhattan projects, but it has recently been a bumpy ride. His huge scheme to redevelop the Javits Convention Centre, one of the city’s biggest eyesores, sparked a raging controversy culminating in extra-ordinary accusations of anti-Semitism (Lord Rogers is himself part Jewish, as is his New Yorker wife Ruthie, of the River Café). Lord Rogers’ long-held left-liberal views on establishing a Palestinian state suddenly became big news. He was forced to make a statement on the issue, something he achieved with dignity but also obvious unease.
Have you ever heard a wince? I hear one when I ask about the Javits. Lord Rogers evenly says his lawyers have advised him against speaking of an issue that is now history. “If it hadn’t been resolved,” he says, “there is no way I would have got the commission for Tower 3.” That, in a city with a notoriously powerful pro-Israel lobby, is unarguable. Subject closed.
He is about to exert a profound impact on a city that for decades has resisted influence by foreign architects and existed in an architectural stasis peculiar for such a cosmopolitan and dyn-amic place. His old partner Lord Foster broke into the territory first with the Hearst Tower and one of the other WTC skyscrapers. But for Lord Rogers, as well as Tower 3 and the Javits Centre (“nearly the breadth of Central Park”, he tells me), there is the $200m (£110m) (€160m) linear park along the East river, a two-mile site (ruined by an elevated highway) that echoes a plan he has long advocated for London’s Embankment. And on top of all this there is Silver Cup West, a $1bn development in Queens for the studio where Sex and the City was filmed. What is it that has suddenly made New York so receptive to foreign architects, and to him in particular?
“Fifteen years ago there were no foreign architects working in New York,” he says. “American firms had developed a system based on repetitive grids, cladding and details, which was kind of mass production, very efficient and very cheap. You couldn’t compete. But it was a poor period for architecture. I think it was art money that made the difference. The US is the richest society and people expect to move up in the public domain through donations and belonging to boards. Whereas we give knighthoods, they have philanthropy. The new MoMA building [he is on the Museum of Modern Art board], which I think cost $800m, proved that the ideas of foreign architects [in this case Japan’s Yoshio Taniguchi] were not just pie in the sky.”
For many years Lord Rogers has been campaigning at all levels against the insidious spread of bland, land-guzzling sprawl and has been putting pressure on the government (from within) for better, denser cities. Is New York a good model? “I love the vitality of the city, its high rise and its density. What was it that Corbusier said when asked what he thought of the skyscrapers in the 1930s? He said: ‘I don’t think they are high enough.’” And what lessons can be drawn for London? “I think London has suffered from the building of a single tower, planted in a park, then a hasty retreat from controversy until the making of another. The streets between can be ignored and they are so important. I think finally the City in particular is recognising this and Ken [Livingstone, London’s mayor] has taken on the principles of the urban renaissance in London. He has proposed 100 per cent of new housing to accommodate the three-quarters of a million projected population growth be built on brown-field land. Taken together with the congestion charge, which is truly radical, and a demand for 40 per cent affordable housing in new developments, this is finally a sustainable plan for a compact city.”
Lord Rogers is about to make the City that little bit denser with his Leadenhall Tower, the “Cheese-grater”, one of the best of a range of skyscrapers about to alter London’s skyline. I ask, slightly mischievously, what he thinks of Lord Foster’s “Gherkin” – has it changed the climate for tall buildings? He praises it lavishly and acknowledges its raising of the game. “Canary Wharf first made the City wake up to tall buildings and, in a way, tall buildings have to be better designed than low rises. They need more attention to get permission, so they are good for architecture.” But, he adds: “The mistake is we can come to think of density in terms of towers: Barcelona is one of the densest of cities yet nothing in the centre is over eight storeys tall. Notting Hill and here [he gestures out towards Chelsea] are some of London’s densest places.”
As we end the interview Lord Rogers offers me a lift to the Venice Biennale conference at City Hall. The theme this year is cities; he is, of course, speaking. He has long been a persuasive, articulate and often lonely voice on the importance of design and density in cities. His practice is famously run with a constitution, the directors earning a maximum of six times the salary of the lowest-paid architect, and last year £1m ($1.9m) (€1.5m) was donated to charity. Lord Rogers is now in a position to put his ideas into practice in an internationally visible way in some of the world’s most prominent sites. He tells me with an infectious laugh that he thinks he gets £1 a year from the Greater London Authority to act as the head of the Urban Task Force. He has turned out to be very good value.
