SIR Richard Rogers, architect of Lloyd’s headquarters and the new Channel 4 building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, has been an international force for more than two decades. Right now, I feel as though I’ve been waiting almost that long to see him.
SIR Richard Rogers, architect of Lloyd’s headquarters and the new Channel 4 building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, has been an international force for more than two decades. Right now, I feel as though I’ve been waiting almost that long to see him.
I turn up at the appointed second because he can spare exactly an hour. Then I spend most of that hour in reception while Richard phones intermittently to say he’ll be ‘just another five minutes’. ‘You weren’t on time,’ says a former employee, incredulously. ‘He’s never on time.’ The Richard Rogers partnership is run on egalitarian principles. The receptionist apologises that she thought I was an Evening Standard motorcycle courier. She says to help myself to coffee, muffins and Mother’s Pride from the kitchen. Everybody does. A nice touch, but not quite the River Cafe, which is across the yard and owned by Richard’s wife, Ruthie. Architects in black polo necks and close-cropped hair moonwalk through reception, where architectural models in Perspex cases hang from the ceiling on stylish metal refrigerator-style shelves.
Richard appears, finally, boyishly pulling a contrite face and wearing bright pink Nehru shirt over Indian patriarch’s tummy, with yellow socks. He’s suntanned, has the eyes and beak of a convivial eagle, grins with perfect teeth and winks a lot.
‘What,’ I snap, ‘were you doing that was so important?’ He was dictating a speech. Didn’t want to make his secretary wait – we can still speak for an hour, he’ll just be an hour late for his next appointment. He laughs. It’s impossible to remain cross. He’s charming, good-humoured, warm and sexually charismatic.
But when we talk, he sits as far from me as he can without necessitating radio contact and leaves the door open. It’s difficult to decipher what he says sometimes, because he gobbles the ends of his sentences, a legacy of his dyslexia. ‘Often I blank out words,’ he explains. ‘I used to be self-conscious. Now I have lots of nice people who cover up my inabilities.’
His practice has been selected to transform the South Bank. Some entrants suggested planting a few trees or tinkering with the existing signposts. But Richard proposed covering the complex in a steel and glass umbrella, linking the present structures and providing a temperate climate. One critic called it the cultural equivalent of a Center Parc with a Bognor Regis atmosphere. What does he plan for the homeless? ‘Maybe we can build them floating hostels.’
He is a pioneer with a vision for London. In 1986, at the Royal Academy, he envisaged rebuilding most of the metropolis – demolishing Hungerford Bridge and Charing Cross Station, putting a monorail across the Thames to link Waterloo with Trafalgar Square and building a series of floating museums.
Now he sees a London throttled by traffic, blighted by decay and robbed of vitality in commercial ghettos, and has a blueprint for a linear park from Parliament Square to Blackfriars Bridge with traffic in a Thames‘Chunnel”, more public places and more mass transport. Richard is a vintage Krug socialist. He believes strongly in the importance of social programmes, chairs the National Tenants’ Resource Centre (leadership training for the‘forgotten people, the one-in-four in Britain who live in state housing’), rides a bicycle, drives a BMW and lives in a grand house. Is he bothered about being a champagne socialist? ‘Only in that I have to do more work to make more champagne for everybody.’ ‘But aren’t you a republican? Shouldn’t you have turned down your knighthood?’ ‘Yes. I can’t even use the excuse that my mother wanted me to take it because I called her and she said, ‘What the hell do you want to be knighted for?” He laughs uproariously.
Richard runs his office on semi co-operative lines. (He likes to make his home and work life seamless,’ says one employee, ‘We celebrate about 80 birthdays a year in the office. Doesn’t everybody?’) The highest-earning partners draw salaries only six times that of the lowest-paid architect, and nearly half the profits are donated to charity. Family visits are encouraged, workaholism discouraged. ‘This is a community,’ says Richard. ‘The restaurant and my partner’s house are over there. The point is to get an intensity of communication.’
‘Why don’t you live in a commune?’ He laughs. ‘I already have a piazza in my house. My five boys bring back their girlfriends and we live in a pretty public way. Most people buy barns and turn them into houses, I bought a house and turned it into a barn!’
Richard was born in Florence of an Anglo-Italian family – ‘soft, loving, undisciplined’. When he was six the family fled Fascism and came to England. Richard was an outsider. ‘It wasn’t good to be an Italian then … maybe that’s the reason I’m so anti-institutional.’
He didn’t learn to read or write until he was 12. ‘In those days dyslexia didn’t exist. No one could understand how, having said the Lord’s Prayer hundreds of times, I still couldn’t remember it. I was so psychologically mixed up – I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy.’ He was bullied and left school without any qualifications.
Aged 29, he married Su. They were together 14 years. What went wrong? ‘I fell in love with Ruthie.’ How did he break it to Su? ‘With all the usual difficulties of saying, ‘I’m having an affair with somebody else’.’ His voice tails off, losing its usual buoyancy. This is difficult to fathom because he says he had a close, rewarding relationship with Su. ‘That’s like saying, ‘How can you, when you’ve had a really good meal, come home and have another piece of chocolate?’
‘So you’re not monogamous?’ ‘I didn’t say that.’
Richard is now very ‘locked into Ruthie. We’re very much in love’. After their first child, Ruthie was unable to have more. They decided to adopt. ‘We thought the baby was a girl. But when the call comes, it’s like giving birth – Ruthie says – and you want the baby desperately. The second he was in our arms we bonded.’ Thus they gained their fifth boy. ‘We never met the parents, but I don’t mind if he wants to seek them out.’
Ruthie and Richard proposed once to write a book together called Sex, Food and Architecture, which he considers to be the crucial things in life. Which is the most important? ‘That order sounds pretty good to me.’ He hoots hilariously again.