Search Results

It is surprising how few architects have come to grips with the crisis that faces the contemporary city. Richard Rogers is an exception. Over the last thirty years or so, the buildings that have made Rogers famous have been, as much as anything, explorations of the principles that have concerned him: flexibility, modernity, inclusivity, and sustainability. At the same time, in his writings and public discourse, he has been a passionate advocate of the city as a place of social and intellectual interchange, a democratic and architecturally stimulating environment. This vision is rooted as much in the civic ideals of the Italian Renaissance—Rogers was born in Florence—as in the late twentieth-century avant-garde. Many of the changes to the public face of London that have taken place over the last decade—the opening up of the river and the pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square are two examples—were called for by Rogers in architectural proposals, writings, and public statements published since the 1980s. Architecture, he has argued, cannot be detached from social and political issues. Increasingly, his words have had a prophetic edge, befitting his senior status within the profession and the cultural life of the nation. As one of the best-known architects on the planet, Rogers, at least potentially, has the ear of both government and business, the twin agencies holding the future of the urban landscape in their hands. For this reason alone, what he has to say merits close attention. Rogers first came to international prominence with the opening of the Pompidou Centre in the Beauborg area of central Paris, designed with his then partner, Renzo Piano, in 1976. One of the key buildings of the twentieth century, it changed the face of the French capital, creating a new cultural heart of the city. Rogers’s banishment of services to external ducts, creating vast open interior spaces, was to become a trademark further developed in the Lloyds Building in London, completed in 1984. Both structures celebrate urban life and activity, although one is a public and one a private space. The Beauborg has been compared to a giant climbing frame.

Responding is always an invidious business: unless you are in total empathy and sympathy with the viewpoint of the author, you run the risk of appearing simply churlish and grumpy. Of course, unless you believe, like the postmodernists, that there is no such thing as an objective statement, it is always possible to have arguments about the empirical truth, or otherwise, of what someone has written. But many pieces of writing are not like that: they represent what could be called a moral ordering of the world, with which you can agree or disagree according to your own such notions. And that is certainly true of the six lectures in this volume. How, writing for a volume in support of Amnesty International, could it be otherwise? Take two of the lectures, which conceptually belong together almost like peas in a pod, those by Stuart Hall and David Harvey. They are perhaps the best-known British Marxist intellectuals, even though David Harvey now teaches in the United States. And they would deserve that appellation even if they were not occupying a lonely niche, since they are among the very few unapologetic Marxists left. Stuart Hall emphasizes three key features driving change in our urban world: the uneven transition to a post-industrial economy and society, globalization, and migration. He asks: What are the chances that we can construct in our cities shared, diverse, just, more inclusive, and egalitarian forms of common life, guaranteeing the full rights of democratic citizenship and participation to all on the basis of equality, whilst respecting the differences that inevitably come about when peoples of different religions, cultures, histories, languages, and traditions are obliged to live together in the same shared space? This is a good question. But, if you know anything about writings in this tradition, you will know the answer in advance: ‘The promises designed to make the poor complicit with their global fate—rising living standards, a more equal distribution of goods and life chances, an opportunity to compete on equal terms with the developed world, a fairer share of the world’s wealth—have comprehensively failed to be delivered.’