Richard Rogers RA: Inside Out;
Le Corbusier: an Atlas of Modern Landscapes
Le Corbusier: an Atlas of Modern Landscapes
Royal Academy of Arts, London W1
MoMA, New York
“I shall leave my city no less but rather more beautiful than I found it.” This was a vow that every young Athenian was asked to make as he came of age in the republic. A vibrant exhibition of the life and ideas of Richard Rogers suggests his desire to explore this vow, not just as an architect but as a citizen.
Rogers is one of the best-known architects in an age of big-brand designers, but “Inside Out” looks at his more powerful legacy as an urban philosopher. Though it gives a lightly edited overview of his completed buildings, the show illuminates the how and why of being an architect as much as the what. A quote on the wall of the opening room – “What I stand for is more important than what I have achieved” – suggests the well-lived life is as important as the work.
Being a significant architect and an incisive thinker about cities are not necessarily the same thing. In a major retrospective at MoMA in New York this summer, the French-Swiss designer Le Corbusier is presented as a genius of abstraction. He clung on to his notions of what man was and what was needed, reducing the human formula to an algebra that could be transported anywhere in the world, the International Style.
Le Corbusier’s plans for new cities were designed regardless of the streets: he famously said, “The design of cities was too important to be left to the citizens.” The city is made out of the plan, and the plan – modern, international, true to its materials – would set people free. MoMA’s exhibition (runs until 23 September) explores his sensitivity to landscape through a series of drawings and paintings, illustrating his fascination with seeing a place as a “view from an aeroplane”. Though persuasive, it remains a rather academic exercise.
“Inside Out”, curated by the Rogers family, feels more like a celebration. It develops a biographical narrative, taking space to discuss particular projects, among them the first commissions for the Team 4 practice (formed by four graduates just out of Yale: Rogers, Su Brumwell, Norman Foster and Wendy Cheesman) and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which Rogers designed with the Italian Renzo Piano. There’s also the Lloyds building in the City of London, completed in 1986, and the “Cheesegrater”, now going up in the City, as well as detailed looks at the Welsh National Assembly, Madrid-Barajas’s Terminal 4 and Bordeaux Law Courts.
It’s the Pompidou that best sums up his architectural philosophy. Initially Rogers refused to enter the competition for its design, proposed by a vainglorious French prime minister who had suppressed the May 1968 protests, but the results were spectacular. The Pompidou celebrates its own technical ingenuity, promising a malleable future of infinite possibilities. In its most strikingly innovative gesture, the design covered just half the potential space, leaving a vast public piazza in front of the centre that makes the whole design as much a “place” as a building.
The idea of the piazza appears to be Rogers’s most persistent preoccupation. He understands that cities are made out of people, not buildings, and that the life between buildings is what matters. “Cities are a stage where people perform and buildings are the sets that frame the performance,” he says. A public space must be democratic, “a place for all” – and one of this exhibition’s main rooms is designed as an open forum, with tiered seats prepared for a series of discussions and a coffee bike selling espresso.
It’s in London that we have seen the greatest impact of his ideas: revival by focusing on the “inner city”, promoting creative areas for museums and café culture, pedestrianisation, and developing brownfield sites rather than continuing to expand outwards. From 2000 to 2008 Rogers chaired the Greater London Authority’s panel for architecture and urbanism and was Ken Livingstone’s chief adviser. As a figure who prides himself on his political principles, he has undoubtedly made the British city more beautiful; however, the urban renaissance of the New Labour era brought its own problems, such as the gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods, the initial failure of the Millennium Dome and the replacement of high-rise blocks with lifeless housing developments.
Tellingly, some projects are downplayed in “Inside Out”: the horrid, untimely opulence of Neo Bankside and One Hyde Park, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, or the unbuilt 2006 designs for the Javits Convention Centre in New York. These are evidence that an architect must sometimes put work ahead of principles. Yet Rogers’s belief in the benefits of the city and the value of civic life are more persuasive, and for this he will be remembered as a passionate advocate of the chaotic, human city.
“Inside Out” is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1, until 13 October
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