The National Assembly for Wales, Cardiff, public viewing gallery © Katsuhisa Kida/Fototeca
Though Renaissance painting, the new art historians insist, was only equivocally humanist, Renaissance architecture remains unambiguously so—in the sense of being rooted in the revival of classical form, and in the larger sense of creating places where people can feel most fully themselves. We feel palatial within Palladio, big-hearted standing outside Brunelleschi’s hospital. It is no accident that we continue to make pilgrimages to Italy in the virtual, pixelled 21st century just as we did in the brick and iron, materialist 19th. Even today, the overlay of Renaissance form with the organic architecture of Italian towns, made over centuries by the people who live within them, creates what remains for us the ideal urban landscape. The quandary for modern architecture has been, since its beginnings, whether one could remove those classical elements—so easily degraded into pastiche, so extraneous to steel and glass construction—and still save human scale and human concern.
This enterprise has been an equivocal success at best, with moments of rapture lodged like lean bits of pancetta inside great epochs of empty architectural fat. Most of the failures have been produced by the commercial cynicism that makes office blocks and faceless towers, though some of the worst buildings were due to an absolutist, totalitarian strain of modernist thought. How to make an architecture that neither descends towards pastiche, nor becomes oppressive and overwhelming? That remains the big question now, as it was a century ago.
And, in a symmetrical fashion, it is no accident that we turn to an architect who has Italy in his bones (though London in his sights) for a sign of how a new humanism could rise from an embrace of new technology. An exhibition at the Royal Academy, “Richard Rogers: Inside Out,” which begins in July, provides an opportunity to consider how that kind of humanism could be reflected in an architecture devoted to modern materials and modernist style.
I saw Richard Rogers’s work for the first time in 1977, on a trip to Paris, where the newly built Beaubourg (as the Pompidou Centre is still called by Parisians) wowed my newly wooed girlfriend, then on her first trip to Paris. At that time I was an old Paris hand of 19 or so, and before seeing the building itself I had already formed the sniffy suspicion that it would be the kind of bad pastiche, Jacques Tati modernism, that inflicts the Parisian business district, La Défense.
But it was a transporting experience. The extrusion of the inner works of the building, its pipes and ducts, onto the outside, far from having the depressing effect that many predicted—the writer Julien Green sneered at a building that “showed its own tripe, like an infant” (an eviscerated infant, apparently)—had the opposite result. It had a carnival effect, the city centre turned genially upside down. It is no accident that the piazza outside the Pompidou Centre remains a central play-space in Paris. It was really due to the intelligence of its underlying plan.
The genius of the museum lay in two “system decisions,” easily missed by the controversialists. The first was to use half the space allocated to the museum for the piazza, creating a civic space otherwise absent in central Paris. The second was to push the front façade of the building right into the street line, making an indisputably city museum for a great city. These two choices, both part of the quiet grammar rather than the colourful adjectives of building, made the Pompidou a museum you wanted to be near, and one that looked better the closer you were.
As a stroke of luck, Rogers, one of the two creators of that exuberant building, became in the years that followed a close friend. Indeed, he became one of my few true heroes—a contemporary whose work puts into practice the principles of liberal humanism that the rest of us can only prattle about.
Liberal humanism? The words die on the lips, or threaten to. Isn’t humanism the opposite of what Rogers offers? That is the view of many who are still hostage to the idea that only buildings that look old will inspire the feelings that the old buildings inspired. Rogers’s point is that the designs of the past won’t work nowadays, not because we are different people—we’re the same; that’s the humanist bit—but because our circumstances are so different. (The new circumstances include our perhaps excessive historical self-consciousness. If there’s a difference between Renaissance humanism and the liberal kind, it lies there: Renaissance humanism reflected their aspirations; liberal humanism, our anxieties.) To reproduce the old styles will leave us with an unintegrated architecture: expensive pastiche for the rich, cheap utilitarian minimalism for the poor, and all of us sharing an impoverished, schizoid public life. (A fact painfully evident in the suburb-dictated life so frequent in America, where one proceeds from the monolithic office tower to the imitation manor-with-a-lawn, while actually living in one’s car, a cramped simulacra of the old hearth.)
One should not look at a Rogers building to get his work, but rather through it, at the approach to the city that the building embodies. Much of his work’s appeal, its charm—to use a word not often associated with 50-storey towers—rises from the perfection of its detailing, his feeling for light, and, a rare element in modern building, its colour. Yet to focus on these details is to miss the systems that make them. For the truth is that they rise from a humane vision of the city.
I will never forget Rogers’s performance at a conference at the Museum of Modern Art in the months right after 9/11, when the future of New York seemed—however hysterical this may be in retrospect—dubious. Some of us city-folk made rhetorical noises about the necessities of rebuilding and what the city means, while a starchitect or two talked about the shells and shapes of their own work, eager to apply it to the wound. Rogers did not talk about buildings, least of all his own, but about cities, about brown land and green land and neighbourhood renewal and the eternal, necessary fight against the car. It is no accident that Rogers’s most enduring work may be his domestic housing, for it demonstrates that an industrial vocabulary need be no barrier to human warmth.
Reading through his Reith lectures from 1995, one finds the same emphasis and faith: not on a style or form, much less a flashy façade, but on the underlying human grammar of our experience. He is always for the compact, the integrated, the urbane, for using brown land to grow on, while sparing the green lands to remain as countryside. Though his forms are always contemporary, his language is organic, with cities seen as breathing and living things. When he talks about London, he talks first about the river. The question for the city is not what might be mounted on platforms, but what can be done to reunite the Thames with its embankments. A naïf coming to his writings might be startled to find that he produced buildings of the scale, or the festive magnificence, of those that bear his name. (Including that controversial Dome, which now seems to be settling into a good city role as a venue for rock concerts.)
Over the course of his career, Rogers has butted heads with Prince Charles, who has repeatedly intervened to prevent some of Rogers’s designs from being built. The sad paradox of this conflict is that the values that the Prince claims to want for modern building—those of the small gesture, the safe place, of a building that puts people before technology or profit—are the same that Rogers evangelises for. The question is whether it is necessary to have traditional form to sustain those enduring values. Richard Rogers insists that we don’t. After 40 years of looking at his work, and a quarter century of talking with him about our lives, I agree.
