the 1980s; in any case, they returned in the1990s. Among these buildings are the Channel 4 Headquarters near Victoria station (1990-94); 88 Wood St (1991-99) and Lloyd’s Register (1993-2000) in the City; Broadwick House in Soho (1996-2002); Chiswick Park, a business park in West London (1999-); Waterside, the corporate headquarters of Marks & Spencer, in Paddington Basin (1993-); and the Grand Union Building, north of Paddington Basin (2000-). Still more projects are in the works. Most are fine buildings, cleanly designed and smartly engineered, each with a flourish of its own – the bridge entrance and the concavefront of Channel 4, for example, or thecurved roof of Broadwick House. But they are more variations than innovations in the established RRP language: again, much glazing, cladding in steel or aluminium when necessary, exterior services and stair towers when possible, and colour accents for articulation. Naturally enough, it was industry, both old and new, that really warmed to the rationality of RRP designs. In 1979 Rogers designed a centre for Fleetguard in Quimper, Brittany. Fleetguard specialises in manufacturing heavy-duty engine filters, but Rogers gave its factory a rather light construction – a long box supported by slender columns that extend though the roof and are stayedby thin cables, with columns and cables painted red. Designed with the aid of Peter Rice, this steel-mast structure became another signature device of RRP (its most prominent appearance is in the Millennium Dome), but it is not just a stylistic feature: as the stair towers open up interior spaces, so the mast structures augment interior spans. The result is a functional flexibility that has suited high-tech enterprises as well, such as the Inmos Microprocessor Factory in Newport, Wales, and the PA Technology Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, which RRP designed in the early 1980s. These, too, are big sheds supported by steel masts, uniformly coloured, that allow for broad spaces mostly free of columns. Prefabrication and off-site construction enable such structures to be built economically and rapidly. Lightness, flexibility, economy, efficiency: these are architectural values, but most companies are pleased to be associated with them as well. In other words, as Powell suggests, there is an abstract symbolism at work here, and other clients have partaken of it, too; for example, RRP has also adapted its shed type for various academic projects, as with its resource centre for Thames Valley University (1993-96). As RRP executed these big jobs, it attracted still bigger ones, such as transportation facilities, dockland developments and master plans. Among its major works in the first category are Terminal 5 at Heathrow (1989-), Transbay Terminal in San Francisco (1997-), the New Area Terminal at Madrid airport (1996-2005) and Terminal 2 at Shanghai airport (2003-). Although the primary innovator here might be Norman Foster – his single-level terminal at Stansted established a new type – RRP has contributedas well; in a sense, its shed structure finds its apotheosis in these terminals.At Heathrow, RRP used giant ‘tree’ columns to hold up its broad open terminal; at Madrid many such columns support the

long wings of the terminal under a great canopy, coloured Spanish red and yellow, whose curves guide travellers like so many waves. (Such ‘Baroque’ shapes are much in fashion in contemporary architecture, but, unlike his more extravagant peers, Rogers has confined them mostly to roofs.) In other words, both terminals are designed as symbolic as well as practical gateways; ‘Like London’s great railway stations of the past,’ Mike Davies, a longtime Rogers partner, remarks, ‘Terminal 5 has a civic role to play.’ This civic roleis important to RRP, and it is evident, too, in its dockland projects and master plans. Over the years the office has produced schemes for parts of Florence (where Rogers was born), Berlin, Shanghai, Singapore, Lisbon and Manchester, among other cities. But much of its planning has focused on London and its environs, with schemes for Paternoster Square (Prince Charles helped to dash this one), Greenwich Peninsula, Bankside, Wembley and the Lower Lea Valley (including the Olympics master plan); and thesame is true of its dock projects, which have included the Royal Albert Docks,Silvertown Docks and Convoys Wharf. Not all RRP proposals for the public realm are ontarget: its scheme for the National Gallery extension (1982) foisted its own new idiom, part Beaubourg, part Lloyd’s, on a programme and a site not much suited to it. But others are inspired, such as the ‘CoinStreet Development’ (1979-83), which proposed that Waterloo station be connected to the City by a lofted arcade and a footbridge across the Thames (fitted with pontoons to support various amenities), and the ‘London as it could be’ project (1986), which argued for a long park along the Embankment as well as a new route from Waterloo station across the river to Trafalgar Square. This kind of will-to-plan, which is often rejected out of hand as a will-topower, is needed today more than ever, and it is galling for an American to note how far major US cities have fallen behind (even at the level of individual buildings, the most innovative designs have lately appeared in smaller cities such as Seattle, Cincinnati and Denver). In any case, commitment to planning has often led Rogers into the political arena: he campaigned for Labour in the 1992 general election; he was appointed chair of the Urban Task Force after Blair won in 1997; and he serves as chief adviser on architecture and urbanism to the mayor of London (he also advises the mayor of Barcelona). Of course, proposed projects are one thing, executed ones quite another: the major public buildings designed by RRP have tended to be further afield. A few are law courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (1989-95), which consists of two circular chambers with two long ‘tails’ for offices and chambers along the River Ill, and the Bordeaux Law Courts (1992-98), a glazed shed with a curvy canopy, under which sit seven courtrooms vaguely in the shape of wine flasks (unusually for RRP, they are clad in cedar) with tops that pierce the roof. RRP, like other celebrated offices, has benefited from the post-1989 push to use architecture to develop institutional images for

‘the new Europe’ (which new oneare we onnow?), a programme in which cities and regions have also participated eagerly. On this front Rogers is seduced, as Foster is, bythe strained analogy between architectural transparency and political transparency. Thus all the glass at the Bordeaux Law Courts is meant to suggest ‘the accessibilityof the French judicial system’; similarly, the new National Assembly of Wales (19992005) on Cardiff Bay, with its glazed shed under a wavy roof, ‘seeks to embody democratic values of openness and participation’. Yet the structures that actually house the Assembly here – two curvy cones which, as in Bordeaux, pierce the roof – conjure up other associations far more readily: sailingboats, church spires, wizards’ hats à la Harry Potter. The wine flasks in Bordeaux and the sail spires in Cardiff raise an important question: what is the relation between the civic role of architecture and its iconic power? Too often iconic buildings are asked somehow to stand in for the civic realm, as if imagistic self-promotion were all that citizens can safely expect from politicians and designers today. Rogers, like Foster and Piano (with whom, for better or worse, he will always be triangulated), emerged in the interregnum between the engineered abstraction of modern architecture and the decorative historicism of postmodern architecture. In different ways all three designershave refined the former and refused the latter, and for the most part they have also fought shy of the sculptural iconicity of contemporaries like Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava. However, like these other architects, Rogers and company are also asked to brand their clients distinctively. For example, RRP is at work on a new bridge for Glasgow, a ramped promenade that is meant to be an ‘icon for the city’, one that will mark its metamorphosis from old industrial centre to ‘European business and cultural capital’. Such abstract symbolism can be effective, but it can also be inflated, and the Millennium Dome might qualify as one such balloon. With its 12 100-metre masts (12 as in 12 hours, months and constellations), ‘the ultimate inspiration for the Dome,’ Mike Davies tells us, ‘was a great sky, a cosmos under which all events take place.’ RRP remains proud of this structure, and certainlyit can’t be blamed for the ways it has been used, but the cosmic connection is grandiose, and most people see the Dome as a white elephant. Recently unveiled, the RRP contribution to the World Trade Center site is a very different animal. One tower in a group of four (the others will be designed by David Childs, Foster and Fumihiko Maki), the RRP scheme sends mixed messages – though like the others it will probably change. At present the design calls for glass façades that extend beyond the rooftop as well as steel cross-braces that support the tower in case its columns collapse in the event of an attack. On the one hand, then, RRP offers a suggestion of transparency, even of spirituality, that responds to the strange rhetoric of American freedom and perpetual funeral that pervades discussion of Ground Zero; on the other hand, it presents an image of security,even of armoured defence against the

9 london review of books 19 october 2006

world. This contradiction comes with the site, and it is compounded by a master plan that now mixes office buildings, a transportation hub, retail stores, anodyne cultural centres and a huge memorial. What designer could make sense of that ‘civic realm’? For the most part RRP has worked seriously on the question of civic architecture in a consumerist age, and its responses are usually well-considered: no more manipulative, on the level of image, than the Bordeaux flasks or the Cardiff spires. Moreover, so insistent is the office on the ‘expressiveuse of services’ that its favoured form of architectural imagery might well be ‘the mass ornament’ of the actual occupants of its buildings – in offices, in circulation, and so on. Yet here the contradictions that first emerged with the Beaubourg return, some of which are real, others apparent. Rogers has acknowledged our mass societywith the Pop and high-tech aspects of his architecture; at the same time he insistson a humanist notion of the city as ‘meeting-place’. The rationalism of RRP designs can be severe; at the same time, the office is renowned for its sociability (it is structured as a non-profit organisation, with the salaries of its senior partners pegged to those of its youngest employees; it is active in charities; and the River Café, run by Ruth Rogers, began as the office canteen). Finally, RRP steams ahead with huge developments; at the same time it rightly promotes the ‘sustainability’ of architecture and the ‘regeneration’ of cities. RRP works well with such contradictions, but is that a weakness or a strength – or both? ∆

POLITICS from HARVARD

Anthrax Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy Philip P. Sarasin Translated by Giselle Weiss Explores the real threats of biological weapons by analysing the famous anthrax scares that occurred in the United States in 2001.

September 2006 • 0-674-02346-3 • £16.95

Failing to Win Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics Dominic D. P. Johnson &Dominic Tierney Examines the psychological factors that predispose leaders, media and the public to perceive outcomes as either victories or defeats.

November 2006 • 0-674-02324-2 • £22.95

new in paperback Public Philosophy Essays on Morality in Politics Michael J. Sandel Addresses some of the most contentious moral and political issues of our time; including euthanasia, abortion, gay rights and stem cell research.

November 2006 • 0-674-02365-X • £10.95

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