The Politics of Power The Brits who Built the Modern World

This is the most successful generation of architects

Britain has yet produced.

Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins, Nicholas Grimshaw

and Terry Farrell were all born in the 1930s.

They worked with each other in the '60s and '70s

and were once seen as a new movement, dubbed "High-Tech".

They entered their most productive years

at an age when most people think about retiring.

Once they'd been outsiders.

Now, they were at the heart of power,

with necks on the line when things went wrong.

They've been designing the future for over 50 years.

Now, the world they'd always dreamed of is the world we all live in.

Luck had sometimes played a critical role

in the careers of this generation,

and from November 1994,

it funded a boom time in British architecture.

When Britain's National Lottery was launched,

some of the proceeds were ploughed

into a new generation of big public buildings,

many of them designed to celebrate the impending millennium.

And who was in pole position to design them?

It's you!

It was THEM, British architecture's famous five.

All of them created Lottery-funded landmarks.

Lord Richard Rogers, a man once vilified

for radical buildings like Lloyds of London,

and a lifelong Left-winger,

found himself working directly for a Tory government.

The Greenwich Peninsula, then a forgotten, polluted wasteland,

had been selected as home

for the national celebrations of the year 2000.

The government was going to hold what it called

the "Millennium Experience".

Quite what that meant no-one yet knew,

which made it rather tricky for the architects to design a home for it.

We started with the Conservative party

and they didn't know what they wanted.

'Hesitancy and delay created a great gap,'

which, in the end, meant the whole thing had to be rushed.

The clock was ticking.

We went to several meetings with the politicians

and then, ran out of time.

We had to get on with it because we were stuck

up against the time limit of the turn of the century.

And they said, "Well, you're bright people,

"you're creatives, what shall we do now?"

We proposed a universal cover.

It's big, dirt-cheap, very large, so we can get off and running quickly.

I jokingly say, "We built a big umbrella for them and they could do what they like."

So, we chose the building and the site, the contents fell behind.

Though Richard Rogers is the name that makes the headlines,

since the start of his career, he's collaborated with a close-knit team,

and it was one of his most trusted lieutenants

who led this particular project - Mike Davis.

For this once-in-a-millennium occasion,

the practice indulged in which High-Tech usually avoided -

deliberate, symbolic meaning.

It was deliberately a festive structure

and it's a bit like somebody holding a hands out.

It's like people going, "Yes!"

You know, it's a sort of celebratory gesture.

And as the meridian literally runs across the site,

I saw it as a direct connection to time.

It would be 365m in diameter,

which related to the number of days in the year.

It would have 12 masts - the months,

and it would have 24 scallops - the hours in the day.

There was one small obstacle to the perfect symmetry of this concept -

that bit which looks like a ring pull

on the left-hand side of the plan.

This was a structure which already existed on the site,

which provided ventilation for the Blackwall Tunnel

and had been designed 40 years earlier by Terry Farrell.

Richard Rogers had to make a hole in the top,

which I was very amused by,

because, by then, it had become listed!

When New Labour swept to power in 1997,

many expected the Millennium Experience to be cancelled.

Instead, the architects had to adjust to a new set of clients.

If the Millennium Dome is a success it will never be forgotten.

If it's a failure, WE will never be forgiven.

-Afternoon.

-Hello.

-Nice to meet you.

-Nice to see you.

For Rogers, architecture is about how things are made

as well as the end result.

The Dome took the grammar of construction to new heights.

It was a huge-scale operation and dramatic construction,

you're building a spider's web 50m in the air.

We hired 50 expert climbers,

so it wasn't just normal construction people,

these were expert rock climbers.

And it's, basically, a cable net.

So, it's a net that's flat,

you pick it up with 12 masts and you hold on to it.

The Dome is, more accurately, a tent made of Teflon coated fabric.

All the High-Tech generation

had designed smaller scale membrane structures in the past.

And what's there is an engineering triumph, it's the lightest structure

ever built of its size in the world

and the masts, all the fabric, all the cables, everything,

still weighs less than an Olympic swimming pool.

It went up tremendously quickly.

Our part went extremely well and we built it on time

and it was a fantastic experience.

And then, of course, the merde hit the Vent-Axia,

as the French say,

and it became a debacle, relatively rapidly.

The difficulty was what they put in,

which I think wasn't very exciting, and so it got a stinking bad name.

We never did do the contents,

so it was a model of how not to do it.

The Dome was written off by the media

as an expensive white elephant before it had even opened.

People wrote vituperative letters saying,

"How can you spend £759 million on a tent?"

Well, we didn't, we spent 43, which was 7% of the budget.

It's the cheapest building ever built per square foot or metre.

We even gave some money back to the Government.

We were amazingly frustrated by the fact that we weren't able to defend our building.

We were not allowed to say that this is a very cheap, very fast build

cos it tended to denigrate the rest of it.

The other 700 or so million pounds went on the controversial contents.

Come 2001, those were removed,

the Dome was locked up and left empty for years.

The Dome is no more, it's now the O2,

and it's great to see it being used and it's now got, again,

7 million visitors, which is pretty much a world maximum,

going to the structure.

I'm delighted that it proves the point about flexible buildings.

It has been adapted, changed and everything else, and I think,

obviously, from the crowds that are going there, it works very well.

Though the sky-high public profile of this generation of architects

brought more work their way, the risks were now higher too.

Norman Foster also felt the full heat of public scrutiny,

with one of his lottery-funded projects.

I dedicate this bridge as a symbol of the new millennium.

In 1996, this design beat 200 other entrants in a competition.

Not for the first time,

Foster drew inspiration from the science fiction of his youth.

There was a character called Flash Gordon,

and he produced across a black chasm,

by pressing a switch, literally a blade of light,

and they all ran on this blade of light and escaped the villains.

The line between architecture and engineering has often been

blurred by Foster, both visibly in the forms of his structures,

and in the greater role he gave to engineers in the design process.

The Millennium Bridge was a collaboration

with the engineering firm which Foster and his peers

most frequently relied upon - Arup.

In the best collaborations, it's totally seamless,

I mean, everybody is contributing.

There was certainly a tacit agreement with us that we wanted

something really sharp and simple and elegant,

that we wanted to pare it right down to the things which made a bridge.

Foster and Arup came up with an innovative new take

on the suspension bridge.

Instead of hanging cables vertically from tall masts,

here, the cables run horizontally.

Just two sets of concrete arms hold them up,

as they span the 320m between shores.

It's an engineering feat. It stretches the boundaries,

and in so doing, created a momentary,

but very distressing, embarrassment.

On the opening day we saw this behaviour,

this sideways behaviour, the wobble!

We'd carried out dynamic tests on the bridge,

but it was something that we hadn't predicted and I didn't like it.

A structure hyped as an absolute statement of our capabilities

at the beginning of the 21st century,

was closed just days after its grand opening.

Engineers set to work finding out

what had made pedestrians feel so queasy.

There were various theories which were put forward,

there were big flags on the bridge and some people told us

that they thought it was due to the wind. Wasn't due to the wind.

Some suggested the pioneering structure itself was to blame,

but the cause turned out to be something which can affect

much more substantial bridges as well - the wrong type of walking.

Our centre of mass moves very slightly from side to side

as we walk and that means we put in a small force sideways.

During the bridge's opening weekend,

hundreds of people crowding on to it at once

meant those small sideways forces began to be magnified.

What happened then is known as the "feedback effect".

We sense a very slight movement beneath us

and adjust our step to that movement.

As a result, the crowd's footfalls became synchronised.

And the more we walk in time with it,

as we're marching from side to side in step,

the more the bridge wobbles,

as, obviously, has now become the term for it.

The solution was quite straightforward,

a variety of dampers were added.

The bridge finally reopened in 2002.

But whatever they've done to eliminate that sway,

everyone knows that for years to come the Millennium Bridge

will be known to all the people who cross it

simply as the "wobbly bridge".

The cost of fixing it added an extra five million to the bridge's

original £18 million budget.

Of course it's been an embarrassment...

But as you know, it was a new phenomena,

it was something that the codes, the rules had never taken into account.

But you have to remember, it was always safe.

Foster won more immediate acclaim

for some of his other Lottery-funded projects,

such as the new roof for the British Museum.

The great Victorian engineers, such as Paxton and Brunel

remained a visible influence on this generation,

both here and at Foster's National Botanic Garden of Wales.

When it came to giant greenhouses however,

a rival project was to catch the public's imagination,

though it struggled to win Lottery backing.

Eden started with Tim Smit saying,

"I want to build the biggest greenhouse in the world. Full stop."

We met up with him and said, "We'd like to offer you the chance to work

"on the eighth wonder of the world and, by the way, we can't pay you."

I didn't expect to hear back from them at all,

and they called the next day.

Tim Smit's goal was to raise environmental awareness

by recreating the climates and ecosystems of parts of the globe,

very far from the south-west of England.

It almost is a piece of science fiction, isn't it?

Because to create a 4.5 acre rainforest in Cornwall

and to do it entirely under this sort of lightweight dome,

is slightly science fiction.

And I wanted us to create a place that was so startling,

that even if you were the greatest cynic in the world,

for a moment, you would drop your guard.

Several people thought he was a bit crazy,

and a bit overambitious, including the Millennium Commission.

When he really got going,

I don't think anyone could resist him, really.

Eden's eco-architecture began to take shape in 1996,

when architects and client met for dinner.

We had a few glasses of wine, as you do, and discussed the idea,

and, inevitably, the napkins came out, that was all we had.

And these are the sketches, there were a lot of them,

they were feverish, and what you see is the start

of the full-span beams that they were working on.

I'm really glad we've got them because, you know,

when people say, I designed something on the back of a fag packet,

this is the nearest you get to the fag packet.

These first ideas resemble one of Grimshaw's earlier designs,

the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo.

But repeating that mix of metal trusses and glass

was an impossibly expensive prospect,

not least because Eden was going to be built

on exhausted, uneven clay pits.

The idea of fitting something onto an irregular-shaped ground profile,

meant that you had to have something

which could be snipped off at the base to follow the ground.

The guy who cracked it - it was cracked out of desperation -

was David Kirkland, who was the youngest of the architects.

and he and Andrew Whalley were working together, under Nick's direction,

and David was doing the washing-up and he saw the soap bubbles

landing on the side of the draining board and he went,

"A-ha! Bubbles!" Because whatever happens with the ground,

they fit to wherever they are.

There's another figure crucial to the Eden story,

someone who had inspired all of the High-Tech architects

back in the '60s - Buckminster Fuller.

I'm an explorer in structures.

I'm interested in the fundamental principles

by which nature holds her shapes together.

Fuller was the inventor of the geodesic dome,

a curved structure formed from smaller geometric shapes.

Six of them greet the visitor to Eden.

Bucky was terrifically right, philosophically,

about the globe and about sustainability.

What's attractive about geodesic domes was the lightness

and efficiency of use of materials,

those philosophical drivers which were behind Eden, really.

Grimshaw and the team spent two years refining their design,

before the Millennium Commission would agree Eden might work

and construction could begin.

I believe the geodesic dome is the weakest structure known

to humankind until the last bit goes in,

when it becomes the strongest.

So, we ended up with, I think, 240 miles of scaffolding.

Everybody was really excited about it, except anybody

who was trying to build a house elsewhere in Cornwall,

they couldn't get any scaffolding!

It became the biggest freestanding scaffolding in the world

and is in the Guinness Book Of Records.

Unlike the great greenhouses of the past, this one doesn't use glass.

To help the structure be as eco-friendly as its contents,

it relies on a fluoropolymer.

No-one had ever built using ETFE,

ethyl tetrafluoroethylene foil, before to this scale.

The great thing about the ETFE foil is it uses 1% of the volume

of material that a glass structure would have used.

So, in other words, it's environmentally much more efficient.

Literally, one person could carry it up, put it in place,

and then it, basically, just clamps around the edge,

and then you fill it with air and it inflates.

For all the technology required to create Eden,

what's most striking about the end result

is that it feels somehow organic, a perfect match of form with function.

In just the first three months of opening,

more than a million people came to see it.

It was the reaction from people who were stood there

and were emotionally moved, which I found, you know,

for a piece of architecture to do that was, personally, very exciting.

By the turn of the millennium,

architecture that would once have seemed far out,

had become a nice day out.

Grimshaw and his peers had been fired up by technology

since the '60s, but some of us only really came to terms with it

in the era of the mobile phone and internet.

By the end of the '90s, almost every man, every woman,

is becoming part of a truly new world in some ways.

There's a leap in technology at the time

and that leap in technology

was something that would sit much more happily

with an advanced progressive architecture.

People being teched up!

Perhaps the ultimate proof

of Britain's new-found ease with modernity

was the appointment of Hopkins Architects

to build a new office block for MPs,

in one of the nation's most historic locations.

Back in the '70s, the goal of High-Tech

was to create lightweight and flexible buildings,

but Hopkins now faced a very different brief.

One thing they did specify, I think,

was that it had to have a 150-year life.

It's a World Heritage Site,

you weren't going to put up a standard office block.

Being next to this icon that is the Palace of Westminster,

it would have been stupid to have built it in brick perhaps,

or, you know, rendered concrete or whatever.

I think we had to use decent materials

They wanted a feeling of permanence

and the idea was that a good stone would do that.

We had to find the find right kind of stone, which wasn't easy,

I mean, we got geological specialists involved.

Every stone that they cut out is numbered,

where it came out of the quarry, and at the top of the building

you put the stones that you've cut from the top of the quarry.

At the bottom of the building, you put the stones

that you've taken out of the bottom of the quarry,

so that the stones at the bottom are stronger than the stones at the top.

Though they'd chosen an ancient building material,

Hopkins brought a modern approach to using it.

Off-site prefabrication, the process this generation had always favoured,

was applied here to stone as well as concrete.

Their belief in honest, efficient structures, meanwhile,

led to piers which aren't straight.

They taper as they go up

because there's less load at the top than there is at the bottom,

and we get an architectural expression coming out.

A sort of structural truth.

What made Hopkins the go-to modern architects

for traditional institutions was their ability to mix functionalism

with the sensitivity to historical context.

You've got the Palace of Westminster, which is quite roofy,

quite spiky, and if you look to the right,

you see Norman Shaw's Scotland Yard building,

which also has a sort of strong roofline

and it seemed to me, it was incumbent on us

to make the same general roof level.

They did this by making a feature

of the building's ultra-low energy environmental engineering.

They're not chimneys, they're heat exchangers,

which extract from the exhaust air

any useful heat or coolth.

We make architectural compositions out of these functional elements.

Like Rogers and Foster, Hopkins discovered there was a downside

to winning the most prestigious jobs.

Portcullis House got a lot of bad press,

mostly due to its cost - £235 million.

One of the reasons it was so expensive was because

it was built in the largest hole in Europe - at that time anyway!

Caused by, of course, the extension of the Jubilee Line.

There had once been a surface-level station at Westminster.

The old lines were lowered to make room for Portcullis House

when the Jubilee Line tunnels were dug underneath.

Hopkins designed what was underground as well as what was overground.

But you just dig a bloody great hole in the ground

and prop the sides apart from each other and put escalators into it.

You leave the sides raw, just crudest engineering,

you don't put finishes where you don't need finishes.

And you enjoy the experience, it's just like going caving,

there's a sort of hi tech thing running through the middle of it.

Though the materials look different, below, as above ground,

this is architecture which shows you exactly how it's done.

A six-storey hole is no-one's idea of a firm foundation,

yet it was on this void that the MPs' new offices had to sit.

These great piers that you see coming down in the middle of it

are actually the piers that run up

and support the interior part of the structure of the building above.

In the central courtyard above,

you can see exactly how the building's load is spread,

by these muscular concrete arches and steel ties.

The atrium, I think, has become the focal centre

for Members of Parliament, to a very great extent.

There's no equivalent room that size in the rest of the Palace.

It's this area of the architects' design

which has kept Portcullis House in the headlines.

They have a well-being function, but their technical function

is to reduce the amount of light

that's coming through the glass roof above you.

But I think anything to do with Parliament

has got plenty of people waiting to lob brickbats.

At the same time as Hopkins was working on a prestigious

parliamentary building, so were Rogers and Foster.

As young men, they'd felt excluded from the establishment.

Now, they were attempting to rebuild it from within.

When Germany reunified,

Norman Foster won the job of remodelling its Reichstag.

He applied the same principles of openness and equality

which he'd previously brought to offices and airports.

I think the Reichstag was a complete reinterpretation

of the relationship between the body politic and the public.

The public are symbolically above the Assembly,

they look down on the politicians, who are answerable to them

and that roof, transparent, is also a public space.

It's an attempt to remove the pomp from power,

to create a national symbol which isn't a monument.

The relationship between people and politicians is also

redefined by the Senedd, the home for the Welsh Assembly.

What they wanted

was a place where they could have their political discussions

and what we brought to it was the public domain.

We'll have a piazza that starts at Cardiff Bay

and goes all the way through the building, right through it,

underneath what we have called the "democratic roof".

And we put the people of Wales above and the Assembly below.

And it was part of accentuating this idea

that you need to engage with the people.

Back in the '60s,

Buckminster Fuller had taught these architects to think about ecology.

In the 21st century, their buildings have increasingly been shaped

by the need for sustainability.

This is a zero-carbon, zero-waste building, it's totally renewable.

So, in that sense, it's a mini manifesto

and it practises what the politicians preach.

The Welsh Assembly had it written into their constitution

an obligation to be sustainable.

It is the lowest energy-consuming building we've built,

from where the materials come from

to the source of energy used to heat the building.

And, you know, we're using that, again,

as a constraint to help define the architecture.

The obvious form is the form of the debating chamber.

It's about light, and also about air.

It is truly a space that is driven by natural ventilation

and, of course, the joke is it's the hot air of the debating chamber.

We could have seen that one coming, I guess!

Back in Westminster, even the home of police and prisons got a more human face,

from the other star name of this generation - Terry Farrell.

Terry Farrell collaborated with Turner Prize winner Liam Gillick on this project.

Functional features such as screens to prevent heat gain

have been turned into art.

The letters glimpsed on many windows

were originally intended to spell out a slogan

which would appeal to any old radical.

You couldn't read it cos all you saw was bits of letters

and then it went round the corner and round the corner,

and he chose, "If all the world lived in harmony, there would be no need for this building."

In other words, there would be no need for a police force or prisons.

At that point, that became the centre of focus,

"Oh, you can't say that, you can't say that."

To appreciate the positive impact

this generation had on modern architecture in Britain,

look no further than what stood on exactly the same site before -

government offices built at the start of the '70s.

These tall buildings were totally inappropriate.

They intruded into the skyline behind the Houses of Parliament.

They were hugely inefficient and what's more, it was falling to bits!

And, so, I argued it is possible to get the same accommodation in,

in a building that's more horizontal,

a groundscraper rather than the skyscrapers.

Farrell's replacement is undoubtedly less oppressive.

It's three buildings all linked with cross-bridges,

and each of the three buildings is round a large atrium,

and the base of each atrium,

I said, was public realm, it was like a square.

It was a place where, in fact, all the staff gather and so on.

The Home Office is on the same scale as some of Farrell's work

from the '80s and '90s, but draws a lot less attention to itself.

Style became quite an issue for me.

After MI6 and TV-am and Embankment Place,

I didn't get any work in London for ten years,

and I knew it was because I was typecast.

And so I took on the Home Office and played a different game.

I said, "It's a background building."

Not all of Terry's buildings from this era

could be called "background".

There's no missing his millennial project in Hull, The Deep.

But having abandoned High-Tech's aversion to decoration,

Farrell's happier than his peers to vary style according to project.

There are some architects you know what you're going to get

in advance and they have a clientele,

a market, that goes to them because they want that thing.

There are other architects

that are about an approach, an attitude,

and I'm more of that kind.

What stays constant in Farrell's work is a concern

not just with the individual building,

but the bigger picture around it.

In the last decade, he's been commissioned to produce a series

of influential master plans for towns and cities

across Britain and the world.

The urban scene in the public realm is, in many ways,

as important as the building and there's a lot of it.

You can get a fine building on a lousy street

and that really pains me and upsets me. I'd rather the street was right

because more people would get pleasure from it.

It'd be great if it was both that were right.

He's moved on to be very, very respected

for his kind of visionary approach

to how you can knit lots of ideas about a city together,

and he has the ability to present these ideas

in a way that everybody gets and wants to be part of.

By the 21st century, all of these architects

were working on a much broader canvas than before.

This was a generation which had always believed

it could change the world.

Now, it was doing so through advocacy and shaping public policy.

I really believe in cities,

and that's really the critical thing I've been talking about.

A compact city where you live, you work, play,

and, of course, a city that is well designed with a good public domain.

To spread this gospel, a man who'd marched against the government

in the '60s, joined it in the late '90s,

as advisor to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone,

and Chair of the National Urban Taskforce.

Rogers affected the whole look of British cities

around about the time of the millennium.

He was a seriously important guy in the government.

Architecture is political, if you don't work with the politicians

then you can't be an architect.

If you have any vision, you have to get it across.

It's partly because of Rogers' campaigns for denser use of land

that the skylines of British cities

have soared upwards in the last few years.

His old friend Foster played a part in that too,

though not through political campaigning.

Even at the start of the 21st century,

the City of London was largely low-rise,

still suspicious of towers after the mistakes of the '60s.

What finally taught Britain to love the skyscraper was a gherkin.

Its popularity paved the way for many others to follow in its wake.

Yet, in 1997, when Foster first unveiled plans for this site,

no tower seemed likely to get planning permission.

Plans for the tallest building in Europe were put on show today.

The Millennium Tower, with 84 storeys, would reach 1,265 feet.

But, this being Britain, it's inevitably controversial.

The super-high tower becomes you know, the symbol of the future,

and, inevitably, it pushes the boundaries, stretch the limits.

I mean, how could any architect resist that?

I mean, it's a dream.

The property developers Trafalgar House looked forward

to over 80 floors of rental revenue, all from one small plot of land.

But not everyone bought into the dream.

I don't think it was a particularly good piece of architecture

and I thought that the building looked

like a frightened rabbit from Watership Down,

it had these two ears on the top.

The main thing was it was very, very tall and it shocked London.

Foster's team went back to the drawing board,

to try to come up with something which would overcome

the widespread resistance to tall towers.

While they did so, the site changed hands,

from a speculative developer to insurance firm, Swiss Re,

who needed a new home.

There are clients who can spark a creative initiative

and make a major contribution to a design.

Someone said the other day,

"Oh, yes, well, Swiss Re was out for an iconic building,"

and I looked at them, I said,

"On the contrary. Nobody even thought like that."

A really important objective

-was creating a beautiful space for people to work in.

-Yes.

So, access to daylight,

access to amenities and good working conditions.

A circular floor plan meant all the employees

would be nearer the window,

giving them more natural light and better views.

The reason this tower's not simply a cylinder,

are less to do with its inhabitants and more to do with the public.

Less building at the bottom created a new plaza

and less tower at the tip made it less intrusive on the skyline.

Working out exactly what happened in the middle meanwhile,

took many months, and models.

What we were trying to do is understand

what made a shape elegant.

What were the properties of a complex form

that made that shape elegant? And there's no magical formula.

You can't say, "Oh, it's twice the radius,"

or "It's three times the height,"

or something like that. It doesn't work.

So, what we did is literally like a beauty parade.

Things like, for example, where the maximum width occurs -

where is the waistline on the building?

Is it high or is it low?

If it's too low the building looks squat and dumpy,

if it's too high the proportions are wrong, it looks top heavy.

So, you can see models like this one where the centre of gravity

is far too low in proportion to the top.

The hope was that all this form-finding would overcome

the opposition which had killed off the Millennium Tower.

I remember the architects arriving in my office

with a model of circular building of a rather dumpy form

and, to their great surprise, I said to them,

"Well, don't you think it could be taller?"

It was a pretty rare moment,

and we tried not to all look at each other like,

"Did he just say that?"

They said, "Well, what do you mean?"

I said "Well, it looks rather fatter than is comfortable

"and rather shorter than is comfortable. What if we squeezed it?"

Though the City of London was now won over,

the tower still faced legal challenges from conservation groups.

But then in 20 years, English Heritage will list it.

I mean, English Heritage broadly.

If you create an organisation that is just there to preserve

things as they are, they are going to be a bit of a pain.

One of the powers of the newly created London Mayor

was to push through planning permission.

The City Corporation wanted me to back it, which I did.

When I ran for office I said,

"I'm going to abolish all these silly rules about height or density.

"Each scheme's got to be judged on its merits."

The tower finally won planning approval in August 2000.

As the Swiss Re Building began to rise on the skyline,

the elegance of the engineering was revealed.

In most skyscrapers, the very top

is reserved for lift machinery and building services.

Foster's team instead topped off their design with a unique space,

which gives 360-degree views of the city.

It was more costly.

Half of my colleagues were saying "This is crazy!

"We can't have this kind of space."

In this particular case, it would have been a travesty

to put that at the top of the building.

The future occupants of the tower clearly loved it,

but the final verdict would be delivered by the public.

I don't think a lot of people were convinced

until they saw the building taking shape.

We have to remember a backdrop to all of this was a press

who were being very negative, attaching a nickname to it,

which I think was meant to be rude, by calling it the Erotic Gherkin.

Well, a number of people did ask where the batteries went.

I felt it was dumb-down name and so we really worked against

allowing people to call it the Gherkin.

-And failed.

-And failed.

That which started as a term of abuse

has ended up being a term of endearment, of affection.

So, I think that's a very nice kind of evolution

over the history of the project.

Very quickly it started to feature in advertisements for London,

it started to take on an iconic status.

You can't design an icon,

it's the public that create an icon after it's been designed.

Many people, including the public,

were responsible for the success of the Gherkin,

yet one name in particular is often given the credit -

and it's not Norman.

Ken Shuttleworth was the Senior Partner at Fosters in charge of the project,

but left, soon after its completion, to set up a firm of his own.

So, is the Gherkin really a Foster building at all?

It would be very unlikely in a large practice

that an architect like Norman Foster would design all the buildings himself.

He had a whole range of brilliant architects

working with and for him, and various of his partners

appeared at different stages of the project.

There is no one person, architect,

engineer, client, consultant,

who can take responsibility.

Only the team can take responsibility.

It's so clearly a culmination of the work

and the agenda and the decades of experience,

it's so CLEARLY a Foster building.

Splitting hairs over who signed off most of the drawings

is just neither here nor there.

Architecture is a team activity,

it takes a lot of people

and this is an extraordinary team.

In the end, the best designs you're really, afterwards,

almost nonplussed about who came up with that idea, this idea.

Speculation about who does what

is inevitable when a firm grows as large as Foster's,

which employs up to 1,500 people.

All five of these architects founded highly successful businesses,

which inevitably took some of their time away from designing.

I still meet clients.

I can't do it on every project, that would be impossible

and I don't pretend to.

I can't pretend that I know every detail of every building, in no way.

London's Cheesegrater, for example,

is often referred to as a Richard Rogers building,

yet it's largely the design of his partner, Graham Stirk.

Their firm has tried to signal the importance of the wider team

by changing its name to Rogers, Stirk + Harbour.

But when it comes to winning work,

the founders are still their most valuable assets.

By the 1990s, Foster had become a kind of brand,

people went to get a Foster building, no question.

The Big Five are "starchitects".

It is a true description of the architects around the world

who are competing for being on this list

of who to hire in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, China...

And none of these five want to be off that list.

They worked all over the world.

Their names are recognised, they've done important buildings

and many of them in several continents

and all of them in more than one.

You go where the opportunities arise.

You go where the opportunity is, you really do.

Grimshaw cracked America in a way that no other British architect -

even Norman Foster - has been able to do.

I think some of the things that people associate with our firm,

possibly are particularly British things

and do probably go back

to the times when we were building railways and dams abroad.

There's no doubt that throughout the world,

the British architects of the second half of the 20th century

became identified with Brand UK.

These architects now design on a scale that they never expected

when they started their careers in 1960s Britain.

Farrell's firm, for instance, has built vast stations in China.

China's different. It is on a different scale,

there's one and a quarter billion people there.

Then to design a railway station

which is about three times the size of Waterloo,

is quite mindboggling.

Traditionally, the roof is the biggest element on a building.

At Beijing South, we did have references to the roofs

of the round temples and so on,

which have that curved, indented form of roof,

and that rang bells with them.

But it wasn't, on the other hand, a copy.

Some are squeamish about working with repressive regimes,

architects generally aren't.

I have absolutely no doubt about working in China,

though how you can say that a quarter of the world's population have got it wrong?

To stand on one's dignity ignores the fact that life is complex,

there's huge numbers of good people doing good things

and I think we do a lot wrong ourselves.

You can arrive in Beijing

at a British station or a British airport.

In 2003, Foster + Partners won the job

of creating a suitable gateway for the 2008 Olympics.

You know, they were setting their sights really high.

They wanted the best airport on the planet,

they wanted the biggest airport on the planet,

and they wanted it done in record time.

Norman and I used to attend meetings where this was played back to us

over and over again, and every time it was mentioned,

we were feeling more and more nervous

about what we're taking on here.

The Foster team scaled up the approach they'd first developed

for London Stansted, such as extensive use of natural light.

Like Farrell's station, their design also responded to local context.

The use of the colours in the buildings evokes

the traditional Chinese architecture.

We used 16 shades of red to gold in the building.

At two miles long, with an area of 14 million square feet,

it's a contender for the world's biggest building,

yet it went from first design to completion in barely four years.

This required not only brilliant architects and engineers,

but also the determination of the Chinese State.

I can remember the very first meeting with the client

and we set off doing our presentation about we do this

and we discuss it with you and then it takes some time

to do the drawings and then we do this and we do that.

Um, and after about five minutes, Mr Cheng, our client,

who was a wonderful guy, wonderful guy,

he got up and screamed at me in Mandarin for about two minutes.

And the guy who ran our office in Beijing, is a Chinaman,

he got up and said "OK, Martin, I think we can go now. Meeting's over"

When I got outside I said to Mike "What was that all about?"

And what Mr Cheng had said was, "Listen, fat boy,

"in the last three months, I've moved 400 families off that site

"and I've not shot anybody.

"So, you can do the drawings to the programme I've just outlined."

Beijing Airport, during its construction was heroic.

Um, literally 50,000 people working on site.

It was just...just amazing.

I remember saying "In 13 weeks, we've got as far on Beijing

"as our Terminal 5 team have got in 13 years."

The new terminal at London's Heathrow opened in the same year

as Beijing Airport - 2008.

But Richard Rogers had begun work on its design in 1989.

It was very difficult to build because, as I've learnt slowly,

it's much better to do a job fast.

I mean, basically, it was the longest ever public inquiry,

you know, I think it's a ridiculous way of handling things,

I can say that because I sit in Parliament.

In the end, there has to be a logic,

because the fees of the lawyers and all those involved,

let alone the time, all our time, it's massive over 19 years.

It must be a considerable part of the cost of the airport.

One interpretation might be that it's quicker to get things done in a dictatorship.

If you compare timescales for a project in China with the UK,

and you analyse it, you can look at the time

that is spent to get planning consent.

When you've taken that out and you compare the two,

there is still a massive difference.

So, the speed with which a project can be accomplished

is not because of the political system,

it's not because of an absence of unions or whatever.

It is about the ability to make long-term decisions,

and to think through very, very clearly the wider implications.

We had, I don't know, I'm going to say,

at least probably 10, 15 ministers in charge of us,

we had numerous chief executives,

chairmen and so on and each one carrying his or her ideal

about what an airport is or what we should do.

Of course, because it took nearly 20 years to build,

it changed numerous times, depending on the political situation.

By the end of it, I was really annoyed and I got pretty fed up.

Having said all of that, I rather love it now.

Heathrow's days could be numbered, however,

if this design from Norman Foster were to be taken up.

It's for the Thames Estuary Airport, sometimes dubbed Boris Island.

Rival schemes have been suggested by both Nicholas Grimshaw and Terry Farrell.

What draws all of them into public debate

is the scale at which they now work and think.

It's inevitable the more buildings you do,

the bigger the buildings you do,

the more you need to get into infrastructure.

These men have worked all their lives for a better designed world,

and that's still what fires them up.

Terry Farrell has just completed a major review

of architecture for the British government.

While this is what Norman Foster's been working on lately -

the new headquarters for Apple.

For him, this temple to technology

has its origins in his earliest work,

which combined innovative engineering

and a progressive social agenda.

If it's 2013 and it's Apple,

it's the same concerns going right back to 1967,

it's creating one building that brings everybody together,

and it's also about pushing the technology to new levels.

In that sense, nothing's changed.

Richard Rogers turned 80 in 2013, the others aren't far behind.

None of them show signs of retiring any time soon.

I don't feel a practice has a beginning and an end,

and a mission accomplished.

People say, "When are you going to retire?"

and I said, "But you want to retire TO something. I haven't got something I want to retire to."

I have every intention of going to 101.

Um, to... There's a lot left to do.

I'm going to keep going as long as I can.

If I'm enjoying life and I'm enjoying architecture

and I'm as stimulated as I am now,

why would I want to stop?

Those five men, between them,

have had such an enormous impact on architecture.

I think they've demonstrated that architecture

can be politically powerful,

financially powerful,

culturally powerful.

They're one of our greatest exports, and yeah,

it makes me feel quite patriotic just thinking about it!

SHE CHUCKLES

It's a shame they're all men. Well, I guess it's generational.

These five architects are the most significant

in British architectural history,

certainly since the Arts and Crafts architects were in their heyday.

Before then, you'd have to go back to Wren and Hawksmoor.

High-Tech can be assured of its place in architectural history,

and in some ways, has already passed into it.

40 years on, the earliest High-Tech buildings are now period pieces.

Norman Foster's Willis Faber building in Ipswich,

which was the first really modern building to be listed Grade I.

At that moment, the High-Tech movement

became a historical artefact.

These structures were conceived of as a kit of parts,

lightweight, adaptable and impermanent.

But the irony is, since they were first built,

they've mostly stayed just the way they were.

As soon as a building becomes historic

and is seen as being significant, you are not allowed to change it.

The Pompidou Centre was meant to be super adaptable

and you were meant to be able to pull bits out, plug bits in...

It got crystallised as it was.

That's the strange thing,

even a High-Tech building becomes a monument.

You look at the Pompidou Centre and it reminds us of the 1970s.

It turned out the most enduring feature of this architecture wasn't its functionality.

It was the promise it made of utopia, delivered through technology,

and that's a promise some of us still want to believe in.

High-Tech architecture is a sort of permanent model

of a vision of the future.

They're buildings that still say, "We've a chance".

High-Tech posits the idea that there is such a thing as progress.

Unless you're an optimist, you would never contemplate

the uphill task of designing and realising a building.

It's a belief in the power of a building, an environment,

to significantly improve the quality of life.

You can learn more about iconic British designs

and the people behind them

with the Open University's interactive Building Stories.

Go to...

and follow the links to the Open University.