SUBJECT:
Interview with Richard Rogers
ATTENDEES:
Richard Rogers
Interviewer 1
Interviewer 2
Dr Limin Hee
Interviewer 3
Interviewer 4
DATE:
1 July 2015
LOCATION:
Pan Pacific Hotel
DURATION:
37 Minutes 23 Seconds
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Note:
Readers of this document should bear in mind that the transcript is a verbatim recording of the spoken
word and reflects the informal, conversational style that may be inherent in the process. The Centre
for Liveable Cities (CLC) is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the text nor the views
expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge.
[ ] are used for insertions, after the interview. The information is not necessarily contained in the
original tape.
All rights in the recording and transcript, including the right to copy, publish, broadcast and perform,
are reserved to the CLC. Permission is required should you wish to use the transcript for any purpose.
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Interviewer 1
I mean, I will just kick off with a quick one. Thank you for having this
session for us. We attended your talk this morning, and it’s really nice to, you
know, track the changes in your career, you know, over…
RR
A long time! [Laughs] The last 50 years…
Interviewer 1
And for architects like us, that’s really an inspiration. So, there’s one quote
that for me really stood out, and it went “We create the city, and the city then
forms us.” So my question, in today’s age, you know, half the time, we’re
spending our lives in a digital sort of environment, and the other half in the
physical environment. What do you make of that, how does that then form
how we live and how we interact?
RR
I think throughout the history of mankind, those changes have happened.
When man began to learn how to write, when we had been from
Mesopotamia, we began to sort of get communications going, when we began
to get cities going, six thousand years ago, when the first cities came together,
these are BIG changes and people come up and [unclear] questions. When
printing was discovered in Europe, and of course I have a European view
rather than a Chinese view, so I…where China got there first. Well it
probably did, but I mean, well [William] Caxton [ca. 1422] invented the
printing press. And there was a lot of unemployment because of all the poor
monks who used to do them carefully, one letter at a time, they all went out
of work, and perhaps equally [of] service, they made wonderful alcohol in
that regards too, so the monks that...
So in a sense, as history goes ahead, I think that all of society includes, I’m an
optimist, shall we say; it’s not those things that worry me, it’s much more
political situations like market pressure which doesn’t allow us to tackle
climate change. I’m going to say that is a much more critical…it isn’t the
difference between one technology and another, it’s about the way the mind
works, which may be influenced by the technology. That’s a long answer.
HL
Actually I have a follow on question to that, because it’s very related to the
work that was just recently announced, that you’ll be leading a public enquiry
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on how the built environment can affect behaviour. You are leading that
commission on that, right? So how important do you feel is the built
environment in creating the city and communities who live in the city.
RR
To make it sure, in a way, I think it’s, if you are born in a brutal environment,
which may be poverty, but which may just be poor design itself, you’re much
more likely to be brutalised. If you are fortunate enough to be living in a
humanistic environment, in a beautiful environment, you’re much more likely
to be more humanistic. I think that has always been so, and this is the big
battle. I believe that shelter, using shelter as sort of architecture in general, is
a human right to individuals, as health is, as education is, and it, shelter
should be well designed, in using design, not just an aesthetic, but as a
physical experience.
We all go to cities which we think “wow, this is wonderful!”, I was born in
Florence. I was very fortunate, I had two good starts in my [life]. I chose the
right parents, mostly…[laughter] probably chose the right parents, you know.
But that is a fantastic chance, because I could have been born in Sudan, I’m
just using that as a… and then I would have little in control, and then
education would be my only hope. So, and I was born in Florence, which was
a very beautiful city. That is a mainly chance, and then you build up on this.
So the point I’m making is is: your environment makes you, I mean,
obviously there’s… there’re other paths, but basically environment is a
critical part—the built environment.
Smithson who…that’s Smithsons, well, is arguably the most important
English architect in the post-war period, They created perhaps the most
interesting building in the Economist Building [London] which fits right in St
James’s Street which is on this beautiful street, perfect with the little piazzas,
fantastic. They also did a lot of research on social housing, and one of the
things they came up with was, you need public space, which is, there’s an
amazing green area in the centre, but also corridors are threatening, and by
the way, again, we’re back to corridors dash brutal, passage ways on the
streets – brutal. So how do you humanise these places? They said “why don’t
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we have a corridor on each floor, why don’t we have a horizontal piazza, in
other words like a street if you like, in the air. They developed that ten years
before they built Robin Hood, and it was fantastic.
In the last, over 20 years it’s been a pith of the greatest poverty with the
poorest maintenance. It was originally designed for English workers, it
doesn’t matter whose workers it is? Now, it’s the place where there’s no love
and care. If you have your own house and nobody looks after it for 20 years,
it’s brutal.
Interviewer 2
You think the lack of love and care was all that was wrong with modern
architecture?
RR
I don’t think…I mean I even think we will look back to the post-war period
as days…that there were a pretty amazing things. I mean, there’s some
amazing, we have these amazing projects. Let’s say on Roehampton,
wonderful buildings on the edge of a park. So, I mean, there were some
amazing schools, the whole welfare state, the idea of social responsibility.
When I went into architecture, about 80% of all architects worked for
government. Today, it’s tiny. So that social responsibility, which indeed, was
what my talk was about, has been eroded. And I think that is a tremendous
sadness. Now, we’re also… we’re learning also from our mistakes. I am the
president of people who live in social houses, and we have try to give the
opportunity to be trained, whether it’s the child-rearing or the collecting
taxes. There are 11 million people in England [that] had to give them a better
education about how you can do that. They are fantastic people, and of course
we have to aide them, there has to be aid.
And in a society where equality, the problem of wealth distribution, is
probably the single most, after climate change, that’s the most serious
problem that we are facing, where we are now the same level of wealth
differential today between the bottom, top 10% of the top, as you were 200
years ago, for all of the progress, has nothing to do with technology, it is
social. It is our political structure…actually you’re doing much better here,
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you have much more housing than we have, which is…
RR
Nobody wants to…because nobody wants to pay taxes, and that’s a critical
problem, if you don’t pay taxes, where do you think, we might understand,
where will the money come from? So if everybody’s game is to try to avoid
paying taxes, rather than say it’s my duty to pay taxes, then you’re not going
to have education, you’re not going to get health, you’re not going to have
shelter. So you have to have a social responsibility.
And at the moment we have a situation where the very wealthy have methods
of avoiding taxes, by investments that are off shore. So if you look at
globally, the major companies which many of you are using their technology
around here, you know, you will find that they don’t pay taxes at all. Whereas
if you are the milkman, or what ever the equivalent is out here, you do have
to pay taxes. It’s not fair, it’s…
Interviewer 2
We actually pay for low taxes in Singapore.
RR
That is not so much my argument so much. My argument is that the tax
system doesn’t really work, whether it’s low or high. Even so, overall, and
I’m sure you do pay that….it’s just that most countries pay around 40% of
their income tax. I don’t know what you’ve got around here, but I bet you’ve
got less than… And it’s not so much about taxes, that the level of wealth that
we can give to the less fortunate. As I said, probably all of you, I don’t
know… we’re all probably mildly fortunate to have chosen the right parents,
but certainly you have chosen the right place to be born, and that is a chance.
Interviewer 2
Can I seek your opinion about our public housing?
RR
Overall it seems to be, from what I’ve seen, it’s of a very high standard. I
mean, I think the idea that you… that the tenants buy, by the way, is
extremely good. We have a reverse, we allow tenants to sell, and that creates
an even worse situation.
Interviewer 2
Then if you’re going to buy or live in public housing, you probably can’t
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afford in most countries to buy your property right?
RR
Well you…I mean obviously the way you do it, you, where you can buy it, is
a process. There are many different ways. You could argue that the
government should give, let’s just say, more money to the poor, [unclear] the
needy, as of one-off buy, I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve read… there are
many processes of building. There are ways which we can have higher
standards, there are ways in which you can have lower standards. But you
know, getting where you’re actually not paying taxes is corruption.
Corruption is one of the three or four most evil things which we have are,
which…that is, avoiding tax paying. It’s not just being legal, it’s being
ethically immoral. I have an ethical position on it.
I think it should, but of course it’s easy to say, but then you go out and you,
you should never build luxury housing? I don’t know whether it’s a… it’s a
nice complicated situation. I mean, we as an office, you know, we don’t have
ownership, the partners have no ownership, we are unique in that sense, we
don’t have no ownership of our own office, we give to charity. We have a
constitution, one of the elements in the constitution is that partners cannot
earn eight times their lowest paid worker after two years, that we pay. Part of
that money that we gets from that earning at eight times instead of 800 times,
go to charity but also back to all the people in the office. Every one in the
office after two years has an ownership of the office. So we try to even it out
a certain amount. There are many ways of looking at it. Sorry.
Interviewer 4
I’ll trying to pull the conversation slightly back to architecture a little bit.
Throughout your career you’ve worked with, and you’ve seen so many
luminaries in your life time, including Peter Cook [b. 1936], [Kisho]
Kurokawa [1934 – 2007] and so on. So how have their work actually
influence your view your architecture as well?
RR
I think most of the… many of the better things, not just modern art, influence
me. Everything influences around you. People around me say how did you
even decide to be an architect? I said I was born in a family where either you
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were a doctor or pretended to be a doctor. I could not be a doctor, I’m
dyslexic, so I wouldn’t have gotten through that. Architecture is easier.
Peter Cook was in the year below me. So hasn’t got… I just use him as a
term, [laughter] so obviously it influences me. The Metabolists probably
influenced me more, Constructivism influence me very much, but so did
[Vinolevsky?] and the [unclear?] from where I was born. So, and then you
store that knowledge, you don’t copy it. You store the knowledge and then
you pull it out at the right time. You know when I do a competition and then I
lose it, which is much more often than when I win it, you know I can say,
well I store the knowledge for the next one. So I can do … And it’s the same.
We have a filing cabinet sort of system, you pull it out over time, you depend
on those things.
HL
Actually I want to jump back to the city again. You’re done a lot of work and
written a lot about sustainable cities. How you feel our approach has been
about building sustainable cities, and maybe more specifically about building
with nature. So far, do you feel that we have been building nature into the
city, or are we building with nature, and can Singapore be a sustainable city?
RR
I think Singapore is probably the greenest site, green trees, greenest of any
city I know, maybe it’s the greenest city in the world. That would be
[inaudible]. That is a determined approach by government, by the leaders,
which I think is fantastic. I think that because you are in a tropical area, many
of the buildings do have…are responding. Certainly all the buildings we saw.
Of course, they were at the top level, because that’s where we were judging
the competition, were responsive. Any building that was not responsive to the
environment will not get on that list, let alone get an award. So there is a lot
of consciousness.
In terms of energy or consumption, you also have the most sophisticated, way
of dealing with cars in any country, probably in the world of which, when I
was Chief Advisor to the Mayor, for those 10 years plus, we stole from you, I
took it out of my filing cabinet, in the way, in other words, so when you go to
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the centre of London, you pay a tax, they like to call it, whatever other…it’s
what you do. They are making, we are doing more, perhaps more than you, so
we are making roads narrower, we’re making sidewalks and pavements
wider. We’re making it much more pedestrian friendly. We’re trying to avoid
people going by car but rather take public transport. We’ve got a really good
bus system, a mildly good, beginning to be new train system, could be better,
you need that. You need better trains, you need better buses.
On the other hand, you have set up an example of, you know, basically cars, I
haven’t got this, cost a lot more in this country to use it, which is good
because that’s the biggest single energy user.
If I want to be an area, which again, I have to be a bit careful, I don’t know
Singapore in depth. I’ve asked for a plan, which I think I'm going to get, that
when I look at Singapore, I suspect you’re not compact enough, I don’t mean
height, but too many spaces in between them. There’s a very good diagram
which shows that basically if you let a city sprawl, you can use up to three
times the amount of energy than that, of a compact city. Now, the centre is
very compact, and it is very good, I don't worry tend to [unclear] compare it
with. It’s brilliant in many ways. There’s just one of the areas that I have
noticed, is that there is a hell lot of floating fields, and that means,
immediately, [once] you have that, it means first of all, you have to go by car,
because you should be within five minutes of a bus-stop, at least. But if you
are spread out, you have to have a car. Secondly, you have to have more of all
this support system. You have to have more police, more ambulances, more
everything, all the things that certainly more mechanical, all the services and
so on. That is not good energy.
Interviewer 3
I have a follow up question from the forum this morning. In the discussion,
somehow the topic veered to the term “starchitect” and you said …
RR
I didn’t like it.
Interviewer 3
Yes, and then, so Chan Soo Khian says that, “Oh, maybe it helps,” and you
said that, “I have to express my disagreement.” But the discussion was cut at
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that point, would you care to elaborate?
RR
I don’t think anyone aims to be a star. If anyone of them aims, here, if I were
to be a star cook, I would try to cook…I mean my wife is a chef, so I have a
chef teach me a lot, you try to be as good as you can be. And some or us are,
rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t mean he’s right to [unclear], seen as being
more… of building things of greater interest. I think that it’s… star is a funny
word. Sort of…are you a star reporter? I don’t know. [Laughs].
Female 2
Right, it’s the media. I think it’s a media…
RR
I know, … I mean the media is one of the… I mean in the sense that the idea
is we should build architecture to attract the media, this is a mistake. I mean
the media I’m using in general. I don’t… I think that architecture should have
a certain comfort. Comfort is one of the [clauses?] that architecture has to
give, so I don’t want to say therefore you shouldn’t have Brutalist
architecture. I’m just arguing whether that it is Brutalist architecture. You
could argue that Le Corbusier [1887 – 1965] is a Brutalist, which you’d say
he is a pretty good brutalist.
Interviewer 1
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. So I think just like in your architecture, looks
very mechanistic on the outside and so on, but there’s a lot of colour, there’s
a lot of energy and I’ve been to the [Madrid-]Barajas airport just a couple of
months ago, and I really enjoyed being there, just being in the space, and you
know. So is that sort of like your critique on the larger urban condition? That
you know, no matter what happens in the world, there’s colour, there’s
brightness, there’s optimism, as you put it.
RR
Yeah, well, we are all searching. We’re, hopefully we are here to be enjoying
ourselves, not just because you’re being paid to, you know I’m being paid
to... You know, I think, I’m an optimist. I think there are some tremendous
problems of which we’ve got today, I have mentioned two of them. You
know, I think climate change could finish mankind, which is a terrible
thought. Having said that, I think it doesn’t help you going around being all
the time morose. I think you can stand up as I’m trying to do, for what I
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believe in, as you all try to do with what you’re doing. But I’m not a
pessimist, whatever the definition of a pessimist is, I’m not sure I have it.
Sorry. [Laughs].
Interviewer 2
Have you, I mean, in retrospect, have you thought about the Pompidou Centre
in its the time, would you have done anything differently?
RR
The question is an interesting question. People often ask me, you know, a
different times is a different time. Yeah, I wouldn’t know what I would do the
same again. I mean would you rewrite your article again? It’s…the thing is,
you’ve learnt more things. You’ve learnt, you’ve had more information. If
it’s something dynamic, which you can change in my work, change it. You
learn. You learn from doing something for the next time, but I don’t think I
would specifically change it. No.
Interviewer 2
Was it very much a product of its time?
RR
I hope so. I think everything is a product of its time. I hope it’s a good
product of it’s time. I mean, nothing is more attached than the [boggy bits?] .
On the other hand, once it opened, the [Parisians nearly?] took it over, they
lined up and more people than ever have been to a cultural centre, museum,
live music design than has ever been before, not just because of the things
that were inside, but because it was a sort of fun place. The whole idea of the
gaps there, finding people that were looking at the building, and then the
people that were looking down, looking across the view, trying to open it up,
making it transparent, making it a word I love which is ‘democratic’, in a
way.
HL
About learning from the past, you had the vision for London, for this 1986
exhibition called “London as it could be”, and, yeah, it seems that many of
the visions that you had, have actually been turned into reality in revitalising
London. What do you think Singapore could learn from this experience of
London and your ideas of public spaces and liveability?
RR
I think we are seeing a massive change towards, I’m going to call it
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pedestrians, but could be cyclist, in other words, about more human and more
within one’s control where we are living. When I was younger, the idea was
that any modern city had to make way for the car. Pompidou actually said it.
When he got elected, he said Paris must to make way for the car. Fortunately
it didn’t, or did in some way. I think now we realise that cities are public
spaces. I mean it’s all about public space whether it’s inside, as it is here, or
whether it is outside. And so, that in a sense is international, humanising as it
is international.
It’s very difficult, I mean the problem with the car is it’s really a tank of
wheels, because it’s a defensive weapon. Usually you have one [unclear]
sitting on it, and you know, it’s dangerous. Now it has its convenience, you
know, I mean I do sort of drive. I haven’t had a car for 20 years, but I did.
once the children left, there was no point. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t
have a car, I’m just saying you have to be conscious that pedestrians have to
have a right. And when you go let’s say, Copenhagen, and you realise that
one third of the people [give an eight-year old?] a bicycle, and it’s cold and
it’s not very nice weather, you know. It’s, you realise, first of all, it’s highly,
it’s very difficult in terms of climate change, but it’s also very good for
friendliness.
London has changed for the better—immensely—since the 50s and the postwar period, when it was really disappearing down that clutter. It was in a
terrible state. Well, you know we won the war and then comm[unism?]… But
on the other hand, at a considerable cost. We didn’t get the money as let’s say
Germany rightly did. And we’d lost an empire and we were… we didn’t
know what we were doing, as I mentioned that we were at the best we could
do was [unclear] And it was terrible food. The only spaghetti we got, it was in
a Heinz tin, which I think I said to you before, and there was only one
espresso machine in the whole of London, which was at Bar Italia. I mean
really, we had to, and everybody thought that Frankfurt would be the next
capital of Europe for business.
What really happened was that by opening our…the doors to people from
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abroad, that’s what made the change. So from sinking [dies?] gone up to now,
arguably the most fantastic, energetic and vibrant capital in the world, only
competing with New York. And I think you can do that wherever you are. I
believe in cities by the way. I am totally convinced that…about city-states.
Now I happen to come from the country which probably grossly [unclear] the
freedom of city states, Italy.
Interviewer 1
You know, just like revitalising London, I find that some of your un-built
work, is as intriguing, or even, if not, more intriguing. It’s [unclear] work and
in the example you brought up this morning, in the industrialised housing, the
whole house came together with steel components and parts. How far could
one take that concept, for instance if you were brought in by Singapore to do
something like that? And what would that mean for both sustainability and
architectural diversity?
RR
I don’t think today, you would do it in steel, first of all. Again, you never do
the same thing twice, I say, up to a point. We doing a very low cost, basically
made out of wood chip and plastics outside, and high insulating stock. And
you can erect it and it will [unclear]. But it depends on how the brief [is]
really, I mean what are you going to do. It doesn’t means that you wouldn’t
do it out of steel, it just means that it’s unlikely raw steel for instance and
you’d probably change… again, that’s was for a very specific market for
anyone who would… too [fans?], two persons [apart/a part?]. I mean I have
always believe that you have to have some flexibility, you shouldn’t have to
leave if you have a baby or another husband, or whether…[Laughs]. Well,
there would maybe be some [unclear]. Yeah, I think it would be fantastic
[inaudible], tremendous potential. And then housing is still the most [unclear]
you can call yourself, but [unclear] faced globally.
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