Richard Rogers was one of the great architects of the later 20C. He was Lord Rogers of Riverside. Alan Yentob made an “Imagine…“ film about Rogers for BBCTV. It has been repeated as a tribute to his long and distinguished career,

You can watch it, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b009228r/imagine-autumn-2007-7-richard-rogers-inside-out

Rogers is best known as the “inside-out” architect.

The designs of his most iconic buildings – The Pompidou Cultural Centre in Paris (Beaubourg) and the Lloyd’s Building in London – are notorious for having all their services on the outside. This is the pipe-work and ducting of air con and heating, water, power and light. This is often describes as a kind of stylistic flourish; but, as Rogers explained, there is a hard logic and, even, pragmatism to this approach. It is the product of a rigorous and consistent approach, over his whole career to the problems of buildings and people.

The architecture of Richard Rogers begins with a Meccano building set. That’s not unusual, many architects begin with a construction toy. Meccano was devised by Frank Hornby at the beginning of the 20C. It’s a metal engineering and construction system

Meccano is conceptualised as a kit of “standard” parts. This is important in building modern structures and systems. Following on from Joseph Paxton’s Crystal palace of 1851, the concept of extendability allows for an architecture of infinite extendibility – in relation to height and width.

This is where the new materials of modern architecture come in. Timber, stone, and brick, are all standardised. But at a smaller scale. So, the engineering and scale of traditional buildings is determined from materials that define structure and space. With concrete, steel and glass, it became possible to build bigger and to separate the load-bearing and visible bits of structure. So, walls can become transparent!

The big idea of the Pompidou Centre, designed by Ricghard Rogers and Renzo Piano and with engineering by Peter Rice was that this big building should have completely open floor plates. This would allow for maximum versatility and visibility. Accordingly, the supporting structure of the building had t be externalised.

The external structure of the Pompidou Centre is all about lightening-the-load and keeping everything stable. The building is pretty big and there’s are some substantial compression loads from within the main structure. All those traditional internal columns, that would have kept the roof on, had to be pushed onto the outside and dissipated through a triangulated lattice of ties.

The crucial part of the structure is a pivoted lever element called a gerberette. This is a cantilever that balances the internal compression of the structure and transfers it to the external lattice of tensioned metal ties. The gerberette parts are cast steel and weigh 11 tons each…but they have lovely sculptural quality.

The appeal to scale in Rogers work is crucial – modern buildings need to be big.

There are reasons of both economy and functionality that make this so. But in addition, there is also the notion that the claim to universal values, explicit in the philosophical enlightenment, is the fundamental expression of democratic modernity. So, scale becomes an expression of access, institutional transparency and egalitarianism. The inside-out bit is part of the logical extension of these ideas.

All big buildings have services and systems that allow them to function economically in relation to power and resources. This is incredibly important in terms of sustainability. The big buildings of modern architecture are part of a system of common-purpose that draws people to cities. The concentration of large number of people into metropolitan areas requires efficient transport systems and utilities to achieve and facilitate the functional and economic objectives of metropolitan living.

By putting all this stuff on the outside of the structure you can maximise the usable interior space of the building. Up to about 30pc. Also, as Rogers explained, the structure and systems of buildings have different lifespans. So, you can effect a system upgrade much more easily, and cheaply, if all the systems are on the outside of the structur

In this context, and in relation to a building structure that may last 100 years, flexibility, efficiency and sustainability become synonymous. We can’t know how people and space will relate functionally in five years time, let alone longer. So, designing the possibility of change into the system is efficient and sustainable.

This is what distinguishes the correctly modernist forms of architecture. There are plenty of big buildings, around the world, that don’t allow for change and are an expression of the bombastic immutability of certain politics and values – just look at North Korea and elsewhere.

Rogers tried to describe his projects in relation to the drama and excitement that this mix of people, structures and systems can create. This was a kind of Archigram recasting of “the street” as imagined in “Swinging London,” and drawing on the Mediterranean townscape of his youth.

The circulatory potential of this access-all-areas version of modernism was most clearly expressed, in the film and across the featured projects, in the willingness of Rogers to allow public space around and through his building structures.

Of course, the circulation of people around spaces also requires way-finding systems. The simplest solution is to colour-code your building. Accordingly, Rogers has developed a palette of “hot” Indian-style colours. This is like the Mexican architect – Luis Barragan

This is all a straightforward evolution of the early modernist association between primary-colours and specific functionality. You can see this in the Bauhaus use of primary blue, yellow and red.

The willingness to do-more-with-less that is a hallmark of the Rogers practice is also a driver of the engineering methodology that allows these really big structures to be built. In the specific context of the work shown, this resulted in a number of elegantly resolved sculptural solutions to various structural problems. It was a shame that the engineering collaborators that had allowed all this to work out weren’t acknowledged more.

The film did make the case for Rogers as a humanistic and progressive personality in the development of modernism. This is quite unusual – the megalomania required to make these big schemes work is usually incompatible with a more humanistic sensibility. I guess this is the way that we could begin to distinguish between, say, the modernisms of Rogers and his contemporaries (Foster, certainly, and Hopkins, maybe).

Rogers was keen to describe his buildings and their spaces in relation to stories and narratives. The spaces and structure of his buildings provide for a succession of different types of experience. And, it’s the experience that people remember. That makes for an emotional connection. That was evident in the changing popular response to his buildings. They do seem to work!

The description of buildings as machines for living is attributed to the the Franco-Swiss modernist, Le Corbusier. He was writing about high-rise developments and attempting to justify tower-blocks as exemplars of rationalism, where economy and functionality combine to provide convenient living-spaces.

In relation to the time-and-motion of everyday life, this idea is commonplace in the kitchen; but less obviously evident elsewhere. In fact, using the vocabulary of time-and-motion to describe activities beyond the workplace is generally unhelpful. The whole point of everyday life is to step back from the world of work, and into a different kind of performance.

The source-code of modernist architecture comes from the panoptic. This was a form of building, conceptualised at the end of the 18C, so as to provide for a kind of reforming standardisation of behaviour – like “house rules” expressed as structure. In the first instance, the panoptic was applied to prison environments; but it was quickly extended to the factory and academy. Nowadays, the panoptic dominates our public spaces.

Normative standards are a crucial part in providing for a stable politics and sustainable social organisation. Le Corbusier’s idea simply recast the normative panoptic in terms of domestic convenience. It was no less brutal for being softly furnished.

It’s tempting to think of Rogers buildings, with their obvious debts to Meccano, as enormous engineering structures. The visibility of moving parts associated with the circulation of air and people makes these seem like big machines. This idea is re-inforced by the Dyson-style pipe-work that is often visible on the outside of the classic Rogers building. Nowadays, there are lifts and escalators too. Owen Hatherley described it, in Saturday’s Guardian, as the “technological sublime.”

But, I don’t think of these buildings as machines. At least, not in the same way as, say, Norman Fosters “Gherkin” tower. The Rogers buildings provide the stage upon which people can perform. Some of that is about work and money, but a lot of it is also casual and recreational. Rogers seems to re-cast the street and to bring the outside-in, as much as putting the inside-out.

In relation to this aspect of his buildings the debt to Situationism, Debord and “spectacle” is more important than, say, the straightforwardly architectural precedents of Le Corbusier.

The idea of spectacle was conceptualised by Guy Debord at the end of the 1950s as a means of describing the capitalist reality of consumption. The spectacle shines; like money. Nowaday’s, the saturated colours of digitally enhanced fragrance ads and the back-lighting of our web-based experiences provide for further elaborations of Debord’s (literally) eye-catching idea.

In terms of British architecture, some of these ideas were incorporated into the blue-skies projects of Archigram and Cedric Price. There, the potential of technology to liberate people the provision of increased leisure were given formal expression through new types of structure. These structures were big (without becoming monoliths), multi-functional, spaces in which standards of behaviour and user-experience were looser and less-prescribed and more varied than in traditional forms of architecture.

The normative power of technology, structures and systems is huge. So, for Rogers and his colleagues; new ways of living always required new kinds of architecture. This would be buildings and spaces by which the traditional arrangements of society could be gently redrawn – and experienced as pleasure and fun; not as fear.

It’s a mark of enormous progress to acknowledge the possibility of alternative modernities. Traditionally, the appeal to rationalism that underpins the development of post-Enlightenment modernity has tended to promote a one-size-fits-all approach to problem solving. The consequences of this folly can be seen all around.