Richard Rogers, Inside Out imagine...

The Royal Academy Britain's oldest and most distinguished cultural institution.

Established by George III in 1768, under the watchful gaze

of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and his fellow academicians.

If you are just a little bemused at the sight of those brightly coloured air ducts

obstructing the classical facade of a much loved London building,

imagine what conservative Parisians must have thought

when they first caught sight of the

Rogers and Piano Pompidou centre in Paris in 1976.

Richard Rogers is a unique figure in world architecture,

renowned for his pioneering work with buildings such as the Pompidou

and Lloyds here in the city of London,

which has the singular distinction of being the youngest building

ever to be granted a grade one listing, the highest honour English Heritage can bequeath.

But Richard Rogers is equally admired for his humanism

and his passionate belief that the life of any city

is as dependent on the quality and vitality of its public space as it is by its surrounding buildings.

He is here at the Academy for a major exhibition to make his 80th birthday

and to celebrate an extraordinary half century as an icon of world architecture.

To celebrate the occasion, Imagine revisits the film we made in

2007 which proved to be yet another vintage year for Lord Rogers and his practice.

At the end of last year, the Pompidou Centre,

the building he designed with Renzo Piano 30 years ago

and which propelled him to the forefront of modern architecture,

celebrated its 30th anniversary with a major retrospective of 40 years' work by Rogers and his partners.

Those 40 years have produced some of the most groundbreaking buildings

and provocative ideas in modern architecture.

APPLAUSE

Just over a year ago at the Venice Biennale, Rogers was presented

with the Golden Lion for a lifetime's work on cities.

And then, two months later, the practice was awarded

Britain's most prestigious architecture award,

the Stirling Prize for the new airport terminal in Madrid.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERS

Six months after that he received the highest honour in world architecture

and was made a Laureate of the Pritzker Prize.

And if all this wasn't enough, Rogers and the practice are enjoying unprecedented success in New York,

the city that so inspired him when he first came here nearly 50 years ago.

One of my great memories is...

arriving in New York, which probably was the greatest visual moment of my life,

when you arrive and you wake up in the morning and you see

this amazing city, which is reaching up to the sky...

I just was stunned by the scale and by the modernity.

Now Rogers and his partners have been chosen to build

one of the four new towers at Ground Zero,

perhaps the most scrutinised and sensitive site on the planet.

If it was like this, I'd say it's definitely wrong to tighten it up.

Because these are not there, they're actually inside the skin now.

He may be right, so I think we need to look at it.

It seemed there was no better time to examine the roots and unravel the story of a remarkable career.

..but I think to have this on that side, it's fantastic.

Very exciting!

Surprisingly for someone who has always championed modernism and the urban environment

Richard Rogers draws inspiration from the Renaissance

and his Italian roots.

Although he came to England as a child, Italy remains his spiritual home.

He returns every year with his family and his wife Ruthie, to this valley near Pienza in Tuscany.

When I come here and I start working in the early hours

and I see the sun coming over the hills and so on,

that's fantastic it's like... That's a real theatre,

and I like both the...

The theatre of nature and the theatre of man.

I mean, Italy is so much part of your life, or seems to be.

what draws you back here again and again?

I find my culture comes very much out of this, really.

I am Italian in everything, except that I'd been brought up in England.

-You were born in Florence.

-I was born in Florence, which is of course,

a wonderful city to be born in as an architect...

One of the most beautiful cities in the world.

D'you think of this as your city?

Certainly it's where I got my culture from.

-Leonardo, Donatello, Masaccio.

-They were not just architects or artists for that matter.

They were fascinated by science. So this is a city where science

and art and architecture sort of all co-existed at this moment, didn't they?

Yes, the very words are re-birth.

Everything was advancing at that time.

Galileo, Dante, all these things came out of what was then a reasonable sized city...

It was tiny by our comparison.

Much of what I believe in, which is the compact civil society, comes out of this, out of this city.

I remember coming up here when I was four or five, I guess,

with my mother and walking through all these amazing hills

and being told stories about Leonardo and others who had walked through this.

BELL TOLLS

That dome, do you remember that as a child?

Do have a memory of actually entering

that Duomo and seeing that dome and seeing it from every street side as you...?

You can't miss it, can you?

My memory of the Duomo was from a flat that we had very close by...

-Up there?

-That must be it there.

The terrace must be that one there on the corner, cos there's the Duomo in front of it.

I've known Richard Rogers since he built the Pompidou Centre in 1976,

and was surprised to learn that in all his visits to Florence,

this was the first time he'd returned to the street where the apartment was.

There's the roof terrace.

-The roof terrace was much bigger than the flat, I remember that.

-Gosh, that's...

It's a real surprise...

-That's rather a grand building.

-I think it's an amazing view.

So from that terrace you'd see the Duomo.

Well, you can see it there's the Giotto tower.

Really quite amazing. Quite moving.

In my opinion it's much better than Michelangelo's dome in Rome.

You can see the structure much more.

If there's one architect one would like to emulate in any way

it's the great Brunelleschi because he epitomises, I think, the concept of the Renaissance man.

A great architect, a great engineer, fantastic sculptor,

could do nearly everything.

In 1939, Rogers and his family left Italy, repelled by Mussolini's fascism

and arrived in England, replacing the grandeur of Florence

with a boarding house in West London.

The transition to life in Britain wasn't easy for him.

He had to learn English and struggled with dyslexia.

But if his education was uninspiring his family still maintained a strong creative influence.

My mother was very keen on the arts. So I was really very much brought up on the arts side,

though of course, also, my father was the scientific side...

And if you put science, doctors and art, you get architecture...

Not quite like that, but sort of.

And what about politics? Did your parents influence you politically?

Obviously as a person "escaping" from facism, I became very politically conscious.

My parents were very politically conscious.

And I think I built that also into my architecture.

There is a very major part of my architecture which is about trying to create a world

which is influenced for the better through public space, through private space and so on.

Unfortunately Britain in the 1950s didn't leave much scope for big ideas in architecture.

However, Rogers managed to win a place at the Architectural Association, better known as the AA,

although it soon became apparent that he needed to look further afield for inspiration.

England had hardly been touched by modernity.

When I started school, the AA was the only school

in the whole of Britain that taught modern architecture.

The whole concept of modernity was so exciting to me,

I was brought up in that sort of environment of modernity,

all the great architects had moved basically,

mostly from Europe to the States of course, they had the great Frank Lloyd Wright,

so the whole tone of the States was what I was interested in.

FOGHORN BLOWS

One of my great memories is leaving Southampton,

where the Queen Elizabeth was the largest thing you'd ever seen.

It was a sort of skyscraper and the little guys with their peaked caps and their bicycles

and all the houses were somewhere down there.

The boat arrived at dawn and I remember going on deck, and being absolutely shocked,

awed, by this change of scale, from toy-town England

to these immense steel structures of high rise buildings

and these great canyons all the way down.

I'd never seen anything like it.

Rogers had come to America to study architecture at Yale.

With him and also enrolled at the school was his first wife Su.

Being a student at Yale there was very little time for thinking.

Incredible pressure. You produced a scheme design every two weeks,

crit, next design. We were three days late, and basically,

we never caught up cos there's so much pressure!

At Yale they met another young English architect, Norman Foster.

Norman and Richard were in the same class...

They became very close during that year in Yale and it became known as the English year.

In the end it wasn't so much the teaching at Yale that inspired them

but exposure to the work of the great American modernists in particular Frank Lloyd Wright.

We went to see every practically every Frank Lloyd building ever built, Norman and I, Su.

We just travelled by car.

And everybody let us in, quite incredible

and it was the most, I mean, really uplifting experience.

You can't appreciate Frank Lloyd Wright without being there.

It's about movement, how you approach the buildings,

it's designed to be approached from certain angles,

to go through the rooms and get a surprise.

Actually Frank Lloyd Wright is the master of suspense and that's again interesting.

Yes, you talk about buildings as if there was a sort of thriller element in them.

Well, there are. It IS like a story, you know, it unravels like a story.

The different pieces and so on and they register like, you know, like different pages,

like different themes within a book or a poem.

On their return to England in 1963, Rogers, Su,

Norman and his wife Wendy formed an architectural partnership called Team 4.

Together they built this house at Creek Vean near Falmouth in Cornwall.

When you returned to England as a team, you and Norman and Wendy and Su

and the first commission you had was the home for Su's parents,

-five architects, you said...

-Six, when I think about it,

all worked and I'm sure there was a few others, on this one house,

for three or four years, erm, I mean...

If I and Norman hadn't been teaching we'd have gone bankrupt. Literally.

When we finished it, and it was a very beautiful house. It was an organic house.

It was on a wonderful slope with a creek at the bottom.

Complex in its way. Though it did use neoprene, did have some fluidity in it.

It opened up to the views.

Very much influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.

I always state jokingly that it took me 20 years to get rid of his influence.

Actually, I still haven't.

While undeniably beautiful, the intricate design concealed unforeseen problems.

When we first started Team 4, the work was using traditional materials.

And it was only with the realisation

building a house in the traditional way was incredibly laborious,

that we started looking at new materials.

And I mean, for instance, this house, because it's on the diagonal

we had a mason here for nearly two years, cutting concrete blocks on the diagonal.

Cos once you start that game, everything, every corner, has to be a special block.

And it's wonderful as a result, but it was very expensive and very, very time consuming.

But it was a beautiful house. But clearly was not economically viable.

The client nearly went bankrupt because it cost much more.

And then again, partly driven by the fact that I wanted to be part of

the problem solving age of housing for the people, housing for the masses.

We really changed quite strongly to standard components, for a building like this.

The years dedicated to Creek Vean had left Team 4 short of other work

and soon after completion of the house in 1967,

Rogers and Foster had to dissolve the partnership.

Salvation for Richard and Su came in the shape of this house in Wimbledon built for Richard's parents,

and now lived in by his son Ab.

It was in this building, completed in only a year,

that Rogers and his partners began to express the ideas

that would direct the future of the practice.

The Wimbledon House programme of clear span structures,

repetitive steel frames, borrowing industrialised pre-fabricated components

from other industries - the wall panels were from the refrigerated transport industry.

And although we only built two houses like it,

the one for Richard's parents in Wimbledon,

Richard always saw them as repetitive structures,

for a much wider audience.

Many of the buildings we've designed are open-ended,

and this is a real open-ended building.

In other words there's no conclusion to it. It feels as though it could take over.

-It's like a journey.

-Exactly. And sort of limitless

and I think that's sort of important to our architecture.

And completely transparent?

And completely transparent, as you say.

It's deeply rooted in, I suppose, the modern movement.

It's clearly influenced by Mies van der Rohe, Charles Eames...

So it doesn't come out of nowhere - nothing does.

It's a progress, hopefully.

This is really meant to be - not totally - Meccano.

I was brought up on Meccano. There's a definite link between Meccano and this.

This is really a kit of parts off the shelf.

And the idea of assembling them any length and then total transparency.

You saw this as a potential model for low-cost housing

which had the values that you wanted.

-Is that right?

-Yes, just before this we won a competition

for the Daily Mail - House of the Year, I think -

and that was a more pure concept of this tube.

We took aluminium panel which was used in things like in refrigeration, buses and so on,

zipped together with neopreme, so it was called a Zip-Up House.

The floor, the wall, and the ceilings, glass at both ends.

Then you could open up these panels by just putting a window wherever you liked.

Total flexibility, a lot of transparency.

But most important of all, it was all a kit of parts so you could erect it there and then.

The competition prize was a contract to construct the winning design.

Unfortunately the Zip-Up House was only runner up

as the judges it felt it was far too ahead of its time and sadly the house was never built.

In the end though, ideas expressed in both the Zip-Up House and Wimbledon,

went on to be used on a much grander scale.

So this building, is it critically important in how your work developed from then onwards?

Yes, I think this was the building which probably inspired our work.

It was the seeds of our future work.

It's a strong structure, it's tough. I think you're right.

If we start getting into the...

If the Wimbledon House is an expression of the physical aspects of Rogers' work,

underpinning everything he does is a belief

that architecture should be at the heart of delivering a vibrant, civil society.

I'm very into the whole concept of how people get together, how they exchange ideas.

The idea of the marketplace, and the streets,

the parks, the piazzas, the places which contain the people.

So the whole vitality of life is connected between social and physical.

And of course, Italy is a country of the piazza and the passeggiata.

BELL TOLLS

-It's ten o'clock and there's still...

-Yeah, sunlight.

The streets are full.

In neighbouring Pienza many of Richard Rogers' beliefs

about urban life come together in the piazza,

believed to be the first purpose built public space since Roman times.

This is a real mixed place...

which is very much what I believe, that the vitality has to be

in the centre, and that this is a point of compression.

All these roads leading to here, and people meet, sometimes accidentally, and probably regularly,

at six o' clock in the evening to have their vino, whatever it may be.

And I think that's really what we're trying to do.

And this is quite a small space but it is dynamic.

We come back to the whole concept of humanism, people come here, meet here.

They sit on the steps all the way round here. Actually it's a stage,

you're looking at a stage, aren't you? A piece of theatre.

Children should have a place where they can go and play

within a few feet or a few metres of their house. People should find a bench and so on.

So that's very much about the humanist tradition and I'm a great believer in that tradition.

Rogers' passion for public spaces was central to the vision for his next building

designed with his new partner Renzo Piano.

It was to be the turning point in his career.

In 1970 the French government had launched a competition to find architects to design

a national arts and culture centre adjacent to Les Halles in the centre of Paris.

Rogers, however, distrusted a project which seemed to him to be elitist.

You must have been the rank outsiders?

You hadn't had a commission and you didn't exactly play safe with your plans, did you?

I don't think we really knew what we were starting...

When you look back you realise, especially when you're young,

there is an advantage of being somewhat naive, otherwise we probably wouldn't have done it

because if we'd known there were 700 entries

and that it would be a tremendously political situation,

we probably would have said, and in fact...

I opposed it from the beginning to end.

He was the one who actually pushed me into doing it!

He was much more relaxed and I kept on saying, "I don't really want to do this!"

I don't believe in centralised cultural centres, it's going to be a palace for a president,

and I opposed it from beginning to end.

Luckily, in this democratic relationship, I lost and we did it.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Rogers and Piano proposal

was to insist on just as much space for a piazza as for the building itself.

You know, the idea of making a piazza was mad, completely against nature.

In fact, that was the only entry out of the 681 with a piazza...

We threw out half of the space

and we only used half so it was completely mad,

but the idea came from this vision that Richard came up with. A place for people,

the piazza being the centre of gravity and the entire idea.

What we did, if we examined the area, and we felt there was a need.

That probably was the most, in some ways, the most important step...

The mixing of public space and building and the relationship between sense of place and construction.

We made the piazza because we never thought we were going to win.

So we did a piazza because we thought, I mean, do whatever...

We did what we wanted to do.

If we go a little bit further, we can get some shelter!

Hey, Renzo, the building leaks everywhere!

THEY LAUGH

It does NOT leak!

Yeah, the concept of the building was a place,

the first lines of the competition, was a place for all people, all ages,

all creeds, for the poor and the rich, for the young and the old.

That was really the concept... To create a place...

It was really a shelter for culture rather than something that sat on a hill.

CROWDS ROAR

The idea of the Pompidou Centre had been conceived in politically charged times.

In 1968, two years before the competition was announced,

the streets of Paris had been awash with student anti-Vietnam riots.

Much of Rogers' initial resistance to the project,

and his passion to provide a democratic, non-elitist space,

had been a reaction to dramatic images of the French establishment at war with the students of Paris.

'68 inspired a lot of what was going on here.

There's nothing more utopian than the idea of a place for all people. And there was an aspect...

There were many things going on at that time, but, the world could be changed.

I mean, we have to remember that the old order nearly collapsed.

We had Pompidou with his plane ready to escape from France

and the intellectual and the worker were going to come together.

So it was a very exciting time.

OK, so it didn't happen, but this is part of that expression.

And the technology is also the optimistic concept.

If you look at the facade drawings and, you know,

with all the audiovisual on the outside, it's full of references

to, at that point, it was Vietnam, and political and social...

it was part of our society, our generation.

And I think this is part of the inspiration of that period.

When the building was completed in 1976,

it was as if they'd landed a spaceship in the middle of Paris...

But there was method in their madness.

This extraordinary external appearance, on the inside,

created vast unbroken spaces, allowing for maximum flexibility.

To achieve this, the team put all the services, heating, water,

air-conditioning, on the outside of the building,

creating an exterior like the world had never seen.

The look of all our buildings from Pompidou onwards has been derived

from what we want them to do...

You look at the problem that you're trying to solve

and the aesthetic and the expression comes from that.

Paxton, the Crystal Palace, to great railway stations.

So we didn't think we were doing anything radical.

We were absolutely within the mainstream great engineering tradition.

And still are faithful to that today.

People often say to me, and I'm sure they say it to Renzo, "Why didn't you tell us

"that the building would look like this?" Whether it's Lloyds, or...

The answer is, I didn't know. Not at that first moment.

It evolves, we are evolved with it. We respond.

In Florence, the narrow medieval streets hold the clue to another key element of Rogers' work.

I mean, it's an absolute perfect room.

Richard's Italian birth and upbringing

are still incredibly strong in the work today.

And I believe that Florence as his home town has so much that informs the work we do today.

It's endemic, it's in the soul.

The notion of surprise rather than pomp.

That's the drama of this city, isn't it?

That you go down a narrow street, you'll see the skyline above you

and then suddenly it'll open up this sort of vista.

The medieval city which is very tight with its space.

And you go down these... and it explodes, and I love that contrast.

You get these dark shadows because it's narrow

and then you explode into the sun with these big spaces.

There are all these contrasts in the buildings both in terms of style

and actually the period and yet they make it.

They are harmonious.

This idea that, before modern, everything is the same.

It can't be more different than that medieval style,

beautiful as it is, to the Renaissance style of the building next door.

-The Uffizi?

-Yeah.

There must have been an amazing shock at that time when they did this.

So we've have always had this question of,

self-expression and a conflict between different styles

which, if well-handled, gives all the excitement and vitality to a space like this.

Amazingly, for two years after the completion of the Pompidou Centre,

Rogers and his team struggled to find any work at all.

Until this building, a surprising commission from one of the City's

most traditional institutions, Lloyds of London.

It would cement Rogers' reputation as one of the world's foremost modern architects.

A parallel Italian image for Lloyds would be the narrow street

that looks towards the Uffizi, you have this very narrow, tiny street

and at the end of it, you get the tessellated, sort of castellated battlement and a great tower.

That's Florence and that's Lloyds.

'It's interesting about these views down the long corridor streets,

'it reminds you of Florence and those views we get of the Duomo,

'that you sort of glimpse at the end.'

It is and when we designed this building, it's to catch these,

if you go down this narrow street and you look up at these towers,

it's very much the same idea, it's a sort of juxtaposition

which you see in medieval cities between different forms of buildings.

And these little snippets of views, so the building has to be really in part, not as a whole.

Of course, it's an incredibly radical vision, this building.

How did you conceive it? I mean, it has lots of names.

The Inside Out building, the Oil Refinery.

Lloyds wanted a building that had flexibility,

it needed an atrium, it was a market space, they wanted to see each other.

And what was the reason behind putting the lift on the outside,

except it's more fun to be on the lift on the outside?

The main reason was because if you're inside,

you encase everything and you don't get the flexibility.

Remembering that services have a short life, like the engine of a car.

It's only going to have ten, twenty years before

a better engine comes along, and then the warehouse,

if you like, the four square building inside, will maybe last a hundred, two hundred years.

'Like the Pompidou, this sense of a building created inside out might have seemed outrageous,

'but it produced the most spectacular office space London had ever seen.'

-Makes me smile every time I come here.

-It's a great view.

This atrium is fantastic.

Stunning the way the light comes down, especially on a day like this and lights up the whole centre.

This is where normally there'd be a concrete core.

That's the real reason for removing all the towers to the outside.

This is the wow space.

Suddenly feel you can look up and get all this light

and you can see all the way that it works.

And these are the open galleries for the trading and there are the offices

and they change, they can be changed,

take off, out the glass and you get more galleries.

I'm reminded of your Meccano idea

and this does seem...

Like Meccano, my period, yes.

It's meant to be fun, obviously, as well, which is the escalators,

the movement, the yellow workings of the interior of the escalators over there,

and it now looks like a kinetic sculpture, and it draws your eye and it's fun.

When you designed it, did you at all ever think of a cathedral space

in one of those great public buildings, in other words.

I think one's influenced by cathedrals, by railway stations,

I mean, I never saw the Crystal Palace but I saw the photographs and drawings,

all these things in one's memory, I don't think one specifically goes and copies them.

But one knows that those spaces give you that wild feeling you get when you're inside.

In Lloyds, we launched another spaceship.

It was radical, it was a bit of a shock,

and the old underwriters had great difficulty adjusting to the building.

The younger underwriters, I think, didn't.

The old, and it's interesting to see the evolution over time,

The older underwriter said,

"I work in that bloody dreadful building, you know, on Leadenhall Street."

And then four years later, they're saying,

"Well, I work in that unusual building in Leadenhall Street,"

and three years further on, they say,

"I work in that interesting and characterful building in Leadenhall."

It's a gradual acceptance of a gothic building.

'However, when Lloyds opened in 1986 the British were not as ready

'as the French had been a decade earlier

'to accept Rogers' latest radical creation.'

It's an abortion, it's an excrescence, quite frankly.

It's what his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales described as

a carbuncle on the face of whatever you like to call it.

When I came to the opening of Lloyds,

I sat next to the Dean of St Paul's,

and he said, "Do you feel beleaguered?"

And I said, "Yes, I feel pretty beleaguered."

All the headlines were "terrible architect".

The public were not used to this type of building.

So it was a shock of the new, so on the whole, the press saw it

as a destruction of a great historic tradition of the City of London.

There was a lot of aggressive criticism.

'Today, the criticism in the media has returned, as Prince Charles,

'among others, has re-launched the debate about tall buildings.'

How do you think the attitudes

to tall buildings in the City have changed?

Big change.

15 years ago, the City of London very much about conservation.

and I think that's why Canary Wharf got done,

because there weren't any really large sites

for the big offices to develop.

-Because the city had pushed them out.

-Pushed them out.

And then it realised what it was doing to itself and it's changed.

You can't constrain a powerful element without it popping out somewhere.

It was all going, as I said, to Frankfurt or Paris, the two challengers.

And for a while it undermined economy in the City, then the City changed,

and said, you've got accept bigger buildings, bigger floors and you see them all around you now.

'The issue of tall buildings in the City remains controversial,

'but of course, Rogers relishes the contrast between old and new.'

Opposite here is Norman Foster's building, which came later and there is the church.

And that other building on the left hand side, which you'd think,

the presence of that building behind would cause an uproar,

but actually the juxtaposition is rather marvellous, actually.

To see these two eras juxtaposed in that way.

It's typical of any city - I mean any city like this one,

which is 2,000 years old, because it was a Roman city.

Any city is, is a layering of history

and every building around here was modern in its time and I love that,

that reading of the modernity against the nineteenth, eighteenth,

and probably this church, which is a few hundred years old.

'Now under the spotlight is the new building Rogers and the practice

'have designed opposite Lloyds in Leadenhall Street.

'When completed in 2011, it will be among the tallest buildings in London.

'But Rogers maintains that the unprecedented transparency

'of the Leadenhall building will have a positive impact on the surrounding space.'

That's a Lutyens facade, that building is by Lutyens,

just over a hundred years old.

And what's interesting about this one is that the Lutyens building

will be able to fit into the open space below it.

This piazza will continue through this,

and this will be a great new public space,

and then you have a 43 storey building on top of it.

It slopes back because, there's actually a view of St Paul's

and up there, you have to keep that view open.

So to get out of the view the building slopes out of that side.

And that makes it that sort of A shape, what people call a cheese grater.

A cheese grater?

-That's what they call it.

-That's what they call it.

But Lloyds was called an espresso machine in the old days.

'Today the 20th Century Society is campaigning for Grade 1 listed

'status for the once reviled Lloyds building.

'As for the Cheese Grater, we shall have to wait and see.

'Towards the end of Lloyds, Rogers started work on a more personal project,

'but one that continued to express the ideas so evident in the work of the practice.

'For his own house, he carved out a modernist interior

'behind a Georgian facade in a continuing fascination with the juxtaposition of old and new.'

Why that, why here, why a Georgian terrace?

Because this is an amazing view and you have a view

across this beautiful park to perhaps one of the greatest buildings in England,

the Wren Royal Hospital, which is very quiet but very beautiful.

You move on up and then you're full of light and

the sort of surprise element is easier in this type of house,

so we created a dialogue between the old and the new.

Making this journey up the steps and arriving here in

this sort of room, this huge room, it's a bit like that sense

of going down a street in Italy and coming to the beautiful piazza

which is full of light.

In fact it is a bit like a piazza, a square, with the outside almost in.

Yes, these are all a very key part of my architecture,

or our architecture, the idea of surprise.

It's a part of architecture, it's like music.

You need ups and downs and different types of forms and rhythms.

There's a dialogue between the solidness of the house,

the lightness of the structure, the way that the light falls in,

but you come from a dark space before.

It's all composed in a way, there's a rhythm, like poetry if you like.

The other thing is that this staircase and the lightness of this material,

the sort of engineering dynamic in this room, I mean this is not what

you expect in this solid kind of house and it's absolutely amazing, this staircase.

For me, this is the sort of architecturally probably the most important piece, the staircase.

It's so light that it nearly feels slightly in tension and slightly dangerous, cos you actually,

you know... and I like that feeling.

You've taken things to the extreme and you feel as though

you're entering, let's say on a gang plank, on going to a boat and you get that springiness and

all the pieces are absolutely necessary.

If you took any material away, it would probably start to bend.

'Soon after the completion of Lloyds, the practice established a new base here at Hammersmith.'

-I understand how it works, but...

-The crazy thing...

'And shortly after, in a radical move unique to the world of architecture,

'the partners turned the practice into a charity.

'None of the directors, Rogers included retained any ownership,

'with the profits shared among the employees and their nominated charities.

'It was clear that Rogers was keen to practice what he preached.'

Most architects like the idea that when they die, the practice dies too.

Richard's not like that.

He never pretends he can do it all on his own.

He needs these people, he needs other people around him

to work with, he's never pretended to be the complete architect.

'The urban placement of Lloyds had triggered in Rogers

'a more specific interest in city making,

'and he began to pursue his long term vision for London.

'His first piece of major city planning was a dramatic proposal in

'1986, to pedestrianise key public spaces in the heart of London.'

We thought it would have been a wonderful opportunity to look at

a piece of London and think about how could London be,

not that it should be, but it could be.

and all the arguments that I had, even at that time,

about how can Trafalgar Square be the centre of an empire if it's a roundabout,

and why is most of the famous walks full of cars rather than walks.

'The principal behind the plan involved the removal of cars

'from the north side of the square, adjacent to the National Gallery.'

We were the first people to make that proposition.

There is a wonderful drawing here, done by Laurie, of Trafalgar Square

after the renaissance, after the change,

and it captures what the practice is about in urban terms,

which is the return of people space to cities.

Ironically, their vision was eventually realised 15 years later by Norman Foster.

Another element of that project was the burying of the road along the Embankment,

on the basis that that way you could free up the whole of the Embankment

as a great people's park and people's place.

'Rogers' plan was an attempt to restore the relationship

'that Londoners had once had with the Thames 300 years ago.'

Creating a park all along the South Bank.

Ken Livingstone is now going to do this with my unit,

we're going to have a park from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars.

That's going to be a fantastic south-facing park,

not quite as we imagined, because we can't get rid of the road completely,

but we'll cut it down.

So these things are now becoming alive again but it was a very exciting moment,

and I would say that, in many ways, it did foreshadow the future.

'At the time, however, Rogers was frustrated by a lack of progress

'and decided to take a more proactive role in politics.'

I mean, what made you take on Prescott's challenge of the Urban Task Force?

After all, bureaucracy, government,

I mean, it's tough stuff for someone who likes to get things done.

I remember he phoned me up and said "I've just read your Reith Lectures,

"I would like your help on a rather specific element about housing."

I said a few days later, I said yes, I will chair this,

but it mustn't be a specific...

I want to look at the state of our cities -

out of which came the report which was Towards an Urban Renaissance.

Up to then, all governments had been scared of cities

and they'd encouraged people to go out.

Cities were pretty hellish to live in, not least because of the car,

then industrialisation had created appalling conditions within cities,

and suddenly Tony Blair, John Prescott and the Urban Task Force

all said, no, we should be moving people back in.

Cities are the only sustainable form of development.

Public transport is the only way of moving and if you sprawl out,

you have to go by car.

The cities are for the meeting of people,

if you're going to have that, you have to have good public spaces.

Other people were doing that type of thing around the world and we weren't unique.

We were probably unique in having the ear of a very powerful

Prime Minister who'd asked us to do it. That was unique.

'Rogers is now chief adviser on architecture and urbanism for Ken Livingstone.'

Richard's Urban Task Force report challenged everything.

And I wrote his basic recommendations into my election manifesto

and we've carried them forward since.

Heavens, how do you get from one place to another?

'Central to Rogers' philosophy for cities and now adopted by the mayor as policy for London,

'is the commitment to curb urban sprawl by only building

'on previously developed or brownfield land.'

Here's your carbon site beyond this park.

There's two major problems.

That's one, bureaucracy, slowness of planning.

More tall buildings than I remember.

The other is, the structure of house builders.

In this country, there's such a demand, they can sell nearly anything.

There's no real pressure to change the way they're building.

we need to use the talent we have, in this country and abroad, to get quality.

Otherwise we're going to go through the whole cycle of the post-war period and I am very worried.

If you take a boat down the Thames, it's shockingly bad what's being

built along most of the Thames at this point.

'But Rogers and his practice have responded to the housing crisis with a project of their own.

'At last, it seems like Rogers' dream of the zip-up house

'40 years earlier is being realised.

'Working with Wimpey, the practice has picked up Prescott's challenge

'to design high quality, low cost housing that

'can be effectively mass produced,

'and they've already built the first 50 at Oxley Park near Milton Keynes.'

The point of this housing is it's not only low cost, but it's also fast build.

There's a prefabricated kit which I've always been interested in since the first houses.

They're made actually primarily of lightweight panels,

they're built in a factory, which you have proper control of,

and in very few days, four or five days,

you build sufficient panels for the house,

and then you go on site and in even less days, you make it water tight.

So it's really a very appropriate house to the house builders, who love it,

and also, of course, the need we have to create houses

which are beautiful and also environmentally sensitive.

It's a tricky place politics, to be involved.

Here you are, you're involved in politics.

You've been involved in politics before, you know, with the Dome,

and you may regret it in some ways, but at the same time here

you built this building which did capture the imagination of people.

But somehow it got stuck in bureaucracy and other things.

I mean what do you feel about the Dome now, all those years later?

I think for us, first of all, the Dome has always been

a success as a structure.

We had two years to build it, we had a very low budget, it actually cost £44 million,

and not £800 million, which was for everything else, mainly the contents.

It's really again about using the least material to do the maximum amount of work.

It's absolutely in the spirit of the practice's ethos.

It's absolutely the ultimate in terms of structural economy,

it's the lightest structure of its size ever built on the planet.

It's made of virtually nothing.

It's an ecologically light touch building.

We collected our rainwater, we flushed all the loos with the rainwater.

It's a lovely story, if you don't connect it with the Millennium Exhibition.

It was 7% of the budget, we were never allowed to say so.

We were forbidden to talk to journalists.

Richard and I suffered for five years over that, it was hell.

'In spite of its troubled, political, past,

'the Dome is now, among other things, a successful concert venue,

'and it seems the building does have a future.

'Since the early '90s, Rogers and his partners have been creating

'radical modernist buildings all over the world.'

I think our buildings have a common language which you can follow back,

I think practically from Creek Vean, certainly from the Wimbledon House,

but as new problems arise so we have to meet those problems

and the buildings have to respond to those problems.

Therefore the form changes and I think, whereas at the beginning,

and even more in the early modern movement,

the buildings had to be political statements as well,

they said, I'm different,

I've got to win this battle and the only way I can do it

is to have big headlines. That battle, I think, has been won.

I think post-modernism, historicism is not a threat any longer,

so I think we can be more relaxed about the way we do it,

we can be more poetic, maybe more elegant in certain things.

Doesn't mean it's better. But things have changed.

'Nowhere is this new found freedom better expressed than in the Law Courts in Bordeaux.'

If people ask me what has changed most in your architecture

over the 45 years or so, I'd say the environmental elements in it,

the buildings are beginning to respond to the wind,

either the way that the wind moves across surfaces,

the way it can take heat off the surfaces and using concrete mass

to contain energy, all these elements start to change the shape of the buildings.

These seven funnels are each one a court room.

You could call them big chimneys, if you like,

with people at the bottom and then the air flowing up to the top,

and that's one of the critical parts.

You get a 50% energy saving against a normal court building.

It's quite an interesting building also because it's the beginning

of both Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour working with me

as senior designers and that's probably their first building,

and it's important in terms of the practice.

The practice has had what I would say are evolving philosophies.

Some of them have been pretty consistent, you know,

an attitude to public space,

philosophies about a building being understandable.

We call it, you know, legible.

You can look at it and you can understand, you know,

how it's gone together.

Wales works beautifully.

When people wander in at the front door and wander into this space

and they look around, and then they go, wow,

and then they realise that actually it's a space that they can enjoy.

They can find a little place, it's a sort of living room, really.

PLANE ENGINE

'Perhaps the greatest challenge of all, for the modern architect

'in recent years has been to design an airport

'that can transcend the tedium of travel.

'In Terminal 5 at Heathrow, which opens next month,

'Rogers and his partners have created a vast space

'flooded with natural light,

'which will provide the largest uninterrupted space in the UK.

'But best of all and perhaps Rogers' favourite building

'is the inspirational new terminal at Barajas airport in Madrid.'

I always think that airports are totally spiritless,

they're sort of utility machines.

Whereas our aim was to create a place that took the concept of travel

and gave it a spirit, just like the big railway stations.

The bamboo roof, which is this flowing wave of a roof,

which you can construct very well in pieces,

and you have to construct very fast, but the interior is very human, very soft.

This is a very large building, 1.2 kilometres long.

So one wanted to create a situation where it wasn't either black, white

or yellow but it was all the colours so we said let's try a rainbow,

and that gives it an identity,

it breaks down the length of the building

but also allows you to say, let's meet under the rose column.

Barajas is a building of which I'm very, very proud.

I often say the buildings which I'm proud of stem from the Wimbledon House,

because it's small and it begins to contain the spirit of all the future architecture we build.

The Pompidou, cos it gets really to grips with a public element,

people walk over the facade, though it's vertical.

The Barajas airport in Madrid,

because I think we've made travelling fun and we've brought back enjoyment

to the traveller rather than just being a function of life.

Inside Out, the new Richard Rogers exhibition, opens this week

at the Royal Academy in London.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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