It soundslike a modern fairytale: in 1971 two architects, neither of them French, win the most important commission in Paris since the war, the design for the Centre Pompidou, and become famous overnight. The two – a 38-year-old Englishman called Richard Rogers and a 35year-old Italian called Renzo Piano – design an exuberant building that delights some and outrages others: a glass box supported by a superstructure of steel and concrete, each façade a playful grid of prefabricated columns and diagonal braces, with a transparent escalator tube that snakes up the front, and other service tubes, picked out inprimary colours, that run up the other sides. Imagined as a cross between the British Museum and Times Square updatedfor the information age, the Beaubourg was immediately popular (today it has more than sevenmillion visitors a year); plopped down in a broad piazza, it was also populist(Rogers still calls it ‘a people’s centre, a university of the street’). Yet the project was contradictory: a Pop building designed by two progressive architects for a bureaucratic state to honour a conservative president, a cultural centre pitched as ‘a catalyst for urban regeneration’ that assisted in the further erasure of Les Halles and the gradual gentrification of the Marais. Such tensions have run through the subsequent careers ofboth Rogers and Piano, who have long identified with the left even as they have benefited from the patronage of the centre and the right. So it goes, a realist would say,for any successful practice in this neoliberal era; the test is what one can ac

Wine Flasks in Bordeaux, Sail Spires in Cardiff Hal Foster

Richard Rogers: Architecture of the Future by Kenneth Powell. Birkhäuser, 520 pp., £29.90, December 2005, 3 7643 7049 1

Richard Rogers: Complete Works, Vol. III by Kenneth Powell. Phaidon, 319 pp., £59.95, July, 0 7148 4429 2

complish given these conditions. And on that score Rogers has picked spots where his office can do public good; as various projects for London alone suggest, no architect of his stature is more civic-minded. Although young by architectural standards in 1971, Rogers had several years of practice behind him. A graduate of the Architectural Association, he attended Yale in 1961-62 with Norman Foster; the two were in partnership, together with their spouses, until 1967. Hard though it is to imagine today, Team 4 disbanded for lack of work, but not before they had completed a breakthrough structure for Reliance Controls in Swindon, which Kenneth Powell describes as ‘neither a factory nor an office building nor a research station but a combination of all three’. The first of many ‘flexible sheds’ that Rogers has designed over the years, the Reliance Controls Elec

ICA Talks October 2006

Sat 14 Oct and Sun 15 Oct Archigram Weekend The Plug-In City, The Instant City, The Suitaloon Wearable House. These were just some of the futuristic projects envisioned by Archigram, Britain’s most radical architecture group, whose continued influence on architects and artists was rewarded by a RIBA Gold Medal in 2002. We celebrate the launch of the Archigram Archival Project.

Sat 14 Oct, 12pm Archigram and Urban Philosophy Workshop

Sun 15 Oct, 3.30pm–5.30pm Archigram Rally and Screenings

Sun 15 Oct, 2pm–7pm Archigram Films & Archive Talk

Sun 15 Oct, 7pm Archigram Opera

Tues 24 Oct, 7pm Pornotopia: Sex & Design Renowned author Rick Poynor asks: what is the future of the new pornotopia?

Mon 30 Oct, 7pm The Atrocity of War Speakers: Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck College and author of An Intimate History of Killing; Crispin Black, Falklands War veteran and former Cabinet Office analyst; Moazzam Begg, former Guantanamo detainee and co-author of Enemy Combatant.

Fri 6–Sat 28 Oct Comica Comica returns, hailed by Ninth Art as “one of the most interesting and high quality celebrations of comics the country has ever seen”.

Fri 20 Oct, 7pm Ben Katchor: Tales of Cities

Mon 23 Oct, 6.45pm Alison Bechdel: Family Secrets

Sat 28 Oct, 2pm Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes Speakers: Comica director Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury, co-authors of Great British Comics.

See www.ica.org.uk for more information on films and other events in the Comica Season.

TheInstitute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH BoxOffice: (44) 020 7930 3647 www.ica.org.uk

tronics Factory owed much to the elegant simplicity of the Case Study houses in Southern California, especially the famous Eames House of 1949. Yet Rogers was also open to the new Pop and high-tech ideas of the 1960s. In 1968, for example, he conceived a mass-produced house made of yellow panels zipped together and set on legs that could be adjusted and so positioned (in principle) almost anywhere. Displayed at the 1969 Ideal Home exhibition in London, the ‘zip-up house’ was, in its high-tech optimism, one part Buckminster Fuller and, in its snappy material and speedy process, one part Archigram (this group had proposed a fantastic ‘pod’ with legs in 1966). However, unlike Fuller and Archigram, Rogers was willing to moderate his schemes in order to get them executed; in the same years, for instance, he built a home for his parents in Wimbledon that combined the Pop modularity of the ‘zip-up house’ with the refined pragmatism of the Eames House. This is not to suggest that Rogers simply compromised. Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP) has continued to experiment with modular designs in search of an economic architecture that is also inventive. Over the years such schemes have included a mobile hospital for rural use, a diner ‘intended as an industrial product’, an exhibition structureconceived as ‘a huge shelving system’ (a project presented by means of a Meccano model), and an apartment high-rise in which almost everything could emerge from a kit of prefabricated parts. Given projects such as the Reliance Controls factory and the ‘zip-up house’, the Beaubourg did not come out of the blue; however, as one of the few prominent Pop and high-tech buildings to see the light of day, it was read as a manifesto. First, it made clear the renewed importance of innovativeengineering for contemporary architecture (Rogers and Piano were assisted by the great engineer Peter Rice, who often consulted for RRP thereafter). Second, it offered one response to the open question of what post-industrial design might look like (‘most of us want it to look like something,’ Reyner Banham once remarked; ‘we don’t want form to follow function into oblivion’). In this regard the Beaubourg was not as farout as the ‘clip-on’ and ‘plug-in’ idiom of Archigram, with its ‘visually wild rich mess of piping and wiring and struts and catwalks’ (Banham), but Rogers and Piano did convey the unlikely mix of the communitarian and the consumerist that came to pervade much 1970s culture. Third, and more specific to Rogers, the Beaubourg demon

8 london review of books 19 october 2006

strated the advantage of pushing mechanical services to the outside of the structure – as a means not only to free up the interior space (at almost 50 metres deep, the open floors of the Beaubourg can entertain all kinds of use) but also to animate thebuilding as a whole (there is an echo ofFuturism here: one thinks of the power stations imagined by Antonio Sant’Elia, with whom Rogers was much impressed asa student). In a sense the service tubes serve as a contemporary form of ornament – they give the Beaubourg both detail andscale – and the movement of people across the piazza into the ground floor andup the escalator not only enlivens the centre but connects it to the city as well. These are all ideas that would recur in RRP work. After the Beaubourg, Rogers parted with Piano (amicably, as he had done with Foster), and more projects came his way, some from the business establishment. In 1978, Lloyd’s of London selected Rogers to design its main building for insurance trading. The programme called for a vast space, ‘The Room’, whose functions could expand and contract with trade volume, and Rogers responded with a full-height atrium surrounded by galleries connected by escalators and lifts. Again, services were moved to the exterior, and the stairs were located in corner towers – the first appearance of this signature feature of the practice. Along with the atrium arch, these stair towers give Lloyd’s its impressive ‘Pop-Gothic’ look; at the same time the stainless-steel cladding says ‘high-tech’. Although Lloyd’s obviously lacks the populist dimension of the Beaubourg, the fact that a building with Pop and high-tech attributes could appear at all in the conservative City was a surprise – a pleasant one for some, provocative for others. Lloyd’s established the language that RRP would go on to develop: lots of glazing, services on the outside when appropriate, with stairs and lifts often placed in towers, all done in such a way that interiors might be made as open, and exteriors as animated, as possible. The exteriors of its buildings do not ‘express’ the interiors in a functionalist way; rather, the office strives to manifest the logic of its designs in a rationalist manner, often through an explicit hierarchy of elements (Powell suggests that Louis Kahn, who thought in terms of ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces, influenced Rogers here). For example, RRP uses colours far more often than most offices, yet it does so less for Pop effect than for design clarity: it applies its colours rigorously, and usually in order to articulate different services or sections. Although Rogers is responsive to the expectations of a mass capitalist world, as he showed with the Beaubourg early in his career, he also believes that architecture must offer a formal order that might do something to mitigate the distractive clutter of that world. Lloyd’s was completed in 1986, at a time when calls for postmodern contextualism were strong, and soon enough Rogers, as a designer committed to modern precepts, was drawn into the fray, sometimes with the Prince of Wales as an antagonist. Perhaps these skirmishes impeded further largeoffice commissions in the London area in