Baron Rogers of Riverside comes on so wood-fired, so extra-virgin, so biodynamic, so ethically sourced and cloudily unfiltered that he might be an obscure Umbrian goatherd’s dish served at Lady Rogers’s River Café. A lesser man would be crippled by the very yoke of the angelism that burdens him and afflicts everything he does.
But, somehow, over the past 50 years this virtuoso has, in various partnerships and configurations, designed a number of sheerly thrilling and stylistically various buildings. Most of his architectural near peers (Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Daniel Libeskind) are plodding one-trick ponies. Rogers is a very different sort of dobbin – a Lipizzaner stallion with a modern jazzer’s hairdo, a deafening apple green shirt and a capacious store of axels, salchows and triple skips.
He has been reluctant to copy himself, to supply a predictable product with a recognisable signature. There is no such thing as a typical Rogers building. The Pompidou Centre, the law courts in Bordeaux and Antwerp, Lloyd’s in the City of London and the later Lloyd’s Register, Madrid Barajas airport and Heathrow Terminal 5 – a few chromatic and gestural quirks apart, these might all be by different hands. Which suggests that he is an unusually protean artist with the mutability of Picasso or, more probably, that “his” work pays more than lip service to the practice of collaboration.
He (or his ghostly collaborator on this book, Richard Brown) writes that his dyslexia made him realise “at an early age that there was more strength in a group, in creative collaboration, than there was in the solo high achiever”. This would come as news to artists such as Beethoven, Thomas Hardy, Otto Dix or any other “solo high achiever”. Quite how or why dyslexia should prompt that revelation is undisclosed. And, anyway, it appears that his idea of collaboration is somewhat straitened. After Yale he was briefly employed in the San Francisco office of the architectural colossus Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: “I quickly came to realise that working in someone else’s architectural practice was not for me.”
The implication of that sentence permeates this portmanteau-ish book. But it cannot be made explicit. For in the open-necked, given-name, anti-elitist elite of which he is a capo and whose mores this book unwittingly portrays, rank and hierarchy are as unmentionable as, say, sex was in the 19th century or as death remains today. There is a disinclination in this establishment to acknowledge that it is the establishment. Rogers, who agonised over whether to accept a knighthood, which he did, then agonised over whether to accept a peerage, which he did, keeps what he claims to be his one and only tie at the House of Lords. The rest of the time he goes rebelliously tieless and, crucially, collarless.
The first part of the book is a brisk memoir of his early years. Florence, where he was born in 1933; bourgeois, doting, intelligent, atheist parents with English and Jewish forebears; flight to London then Surrey at the very beginning of the war; hideously violent boarding school; less hideous day school; teenage hitchhiking and getting banged up in solitary on trumped-up charges in Venice; national service in Trieste where he spent much time with his evidently inspiring cousin Ernesto Rogers, architect of the Torre Velasca in central Milan. Now, all this is peculiar to Rogers but it amounts to no more than a sketch wanting detail. A literal Bildungsroman but a very thin one.
As architecture begins to preoccupy him he manages to muster greater interest in his former self. Architecture and the sort of architect he will become start to define him. The text gets fuller, richer. At the same time, however, it becomes more generalised. It might be a personal history that he attempts to recount but much is an utterly familiar trawl through postwar Britain. The resistance to modernism, the Festival of Britain, discovering Le Corbusier, the ineffable Smithsons, Stirling and Gowan, an Aldermaston march – and then Yale, where he met another Fulbright scholar, Norman Foster, who would become his first collaborator.
He rather predictably ticks off Yale’s campus for being “a strange pastiche of a Victorian Oxbridge college … Gothic revival buildings”. (Pastiche is a scornfully pejorative word among architects of Rogers’s generation and aesthetic bias.) He writes interestingly if, again, too briefly about his first professor there, Paul Rudolph, whose untheoretical approach and insistence on the primacy of appearance seem to have rather shocked him; though the Lloyd’s building’s obvious debt to Rudolph’s great Art and Architecture Building, opened the year after Rogers left Yale, suggests that he absorbed a lot from this famously querulous teacher. He tucked it behind his ear for later.
The more immediate future would be coloured by the work of the Californian Craig Ellwood, as energetically heterosexual as Rudolph was homosexual. Rogers’s only mention of him is in a list of west coast architects whose work he and his first wife Su drove to see in a Renault Dauphine, which now and again spontaneously combusted. I think the accounts of these fires are intended to be funny.
The house Rogers designed for his parents in Wimbledon owes much to Ellwood and the California Case Studies Houses sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine in the 1940s and 50s. These are pared down, but hardly austere or threatening, and comfortably non-didactic – family-friendly modernism.
One moment Rogers is scratching around doing houses for friends of friends and in-laws, and low-cost factories, and wondering whether he should jack it in, the next he and Renzo Piano have won the competition to design what was to be called the Centre du Plateau Beaubourg: “We had no idea what we were taking on.”
That becomes all too evident. Designing a building whose only forebears had been the paper dreams of the Archigram group and Cedric Price was one thing, maybe the easy bit. Coping with the constant barbs and brickbats of French architectural panjandrums, politicians, planners, community groups, steel manufacturers and the press was something else again. An organisation called Geste Architectural was established with the sole purpose of bringing lawsuits, an echo of those received by Le Corbusier in Marseille 25 years previously. Robert Delaunay’s widow Sonia said she’d rather burn his paintings than have them exhibited in the building.
Not all the attacks were founded in chauvinism. The British press joined in too. Rogers’s long chapter on the making of the Pompidou Centre is by far the best thing in the book. While the building itself has proved inimitable, its example has, usually regrettably, been copied: “cultural” regeneration seldom achieves anything beyond the self-congratulation of the arts loop.
After five years living in Place des Vosges in Paris, he and his new wife Ruth moved, in 1977, back to London, where “olive oil was sold in chemists for cleaning your ears out”. This is balls. It was widely available in Cypriot Camden Town and Harringay, Italian King’s Cross and Clerkenwell, everywhere in Soho. Again Rogers slips into easy (and wrong) generalisation.
His account of his ascent to the peak of New Labour’s great and good is more precise, though it’s constellated with praise for those he meets en route. He is generous with such words as “genius”, “poetic”, “excellent”. He finds it difficult to recall the names of his many “close friends”, most of whom are almost as successful as he is. Some of them, the fawnocracy, have lined up to supply a few back-cover plugs. He has a good word for everyone apart from volume builders, “arch-conservative” planners and the Prince of Wales.
There are some predictable omissions. Just as his old friend and rival Foster perks up whenever a central Asian dictator drops by, so has Rogers developed a peculiar late-life fondness for autodestruction. “Do as I say, not as I do” is not a happy label to bear. Quite why the greatest architect of his age, who has campaigned for equality, social housing, lifestyle-size street furniture, improved cities, community communities, multicultural handshake sheds and countless other right-on causes should all but shred his reputation by designing obscenely expensive and very ugly flats is a mystery. Should there be a further edition of this memoir, it ought to be entitled “Prosecco Socialism: A User’s Manual”.
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