REMEMBERING RICHARD ROGERS

from The Maybourne Magazine Spring/Summer 2022

TALKING HEADS

Remembering Richard Rogers 1933 to 2021

The world of architecture lost one of its most charismatic figures when Richard Rogers, a dear friend of Maybourne Hotel Group, passed away at eighty-eight. Our thoughts are with his wife Ruth, his sons and his fourteen grandchildren. Deyan Sudjic remembers the visionary behind The Berkeley’s renovation

You need only glimpse the Pompidou Centre to know that, for Richard Rogers, architecture was always more a passion than a profession. Its street wall of brightly coloured pipes, and external escalators threaded through glass tubes slung from an exposed steel structure, were a joyful shot in the arm for contemporary architecture when the Pompidou opened in 1977. Gathering a museum, public library, cinema, theatre and exhibition spaces into a single building that stayed open late at night, and that offered the best free view of Paris, Rogers and Renzo Piano – his partner at the time – redefined how cultural buildings could look and work.

Rogers ran his practice as a campaign, rather than a business. He wanted to build carbon-neutral cities that didn’t depend on cars, that offered decent and affordable homes, and that had a vibrant public realm, open to everyone. These objectives depended on dealing with big, complex issues and were not always achievable. But that did not stop him trying.

Born in Florence, Rogers brought to Britain a flavour of the Italy that he had left behind; a world of street cafés and travertine-floored piazzas. They would be his basis for a compact, walkable city – the ideal antidote to characterless, car-dominated suburbs. No element of civilised life would be further than fifteen minutes from every resident.

That vision was one he advocated as leader of the government’s urban task force during Tony Blair’s premiership, then – with impressive bipartisanship – as an adviser to Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson during their terms as mayor of London.

Rogers was a close friend of Maybourne Hotel Group’s Paddy McKillen. They met after McKillen got talking to Ruth Rogers – a Michelin-starred restaurateur and the architect’s wife – at a gallery opening in 2003. The friendship became professional as well as personal. Rogers and his architectural practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, helped Maybourne remodel The Berkeley, giving it a sparkling interpretation of modern glamour with what he called ‘light and drama’.

What was particularly impressive about Rogers was his ability to wear his intellect and architectural knowledge lightly. ‘As any of us know who were friends of Richard, he was generous to a fault,’ remembers McKillen. ‘Even at

Above Richard Rogers admires ‘Snowfall’ – his installation of 137,000 lights at The Berkeley Below The Centre Pompidou, which Rogers designed with Renzo Piano design meetings, he would often say to his team, “Listen, Paddy is the client. We must listen to the client.” What generosity.’ The main approach to The Berkeley was transformed with a glass canopy that floats magically over it, supported by an ingenious and elegant structure of carbon fibre and steel. And at The Connaught, Rogers’s son – designer Ab Rogers – created a colourful cake shop, The

Connaught Patisserie.

The final design project of Rogers’s career was a gallery for drawings at McKillen’s Château La Coste in Provence, an art, sculpture and wine destination. Opened in 2021, it is an impressive addition to an already remarkable accumulation of on-site architectural gems. These include a pavilion by Tadao Ando, an outdoor theatre by Frank Gehry and a wine cellar by Jean Nouvel, amid installations such as a Louise Bourgeois spider and work by Alexander Calder. Rogers and McKillen chose the site for the gallery during a bike ride along the chalky track of an old Roman road.

The result is small but spectacular: hovering apparently weightless amid trees that ring the La Coste vineyard, it’s a vivid orange, steel cantilever structure, projecting from a thickly wooded ridge too steep for planting the grapes that grow in neat rows on either side.

Back in the 1970s, as his career was taking off, Rogers gave a fiery speech putting the case for architecture as a kind of social revolution. Prefiguring present-day concerns about the impact of global warming and social inequality, he warned the Royal Institute of British Architects, ‘If this is

He talked about designing places for people, rather than designing buildings

utopian daydreaming, and we reject the idea of a new social and economic order, then we must face the aftermath, which is starvation and destruction.’

And even as he grew ever more successful, with a place in the House of Lords, the Pritzker Prize, and skyscrapers from Australia to Mexico, that idea of turning utopia into reality stayed with him. Rogers knew how to make the most of intimate domestic spaces as well as the urban spaces that bring a city to life. The focus of his London home was its spectacular double height living room, with a circular table designed by his friend Norman Foster. Constantly crowded with visitors, it was overlooked by a wall hung with Warhol portraits of Mao, and enjoyed a sublime view of Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital Chelsea. ‘Some people turn barns into houses,’ he used to say. ‘We turned a house into a barn.’ He gave The River Café – the restaurant founded by Ruthie in what was once an annex of his west London studio –something of the same character.

Rogers preferred to talk about designing places for people, rather than designing buildings. That meant being as creative with the architecture of the spaces in and around the structures as with the buildings themselves. He designed a parliament for Wales in Cardiff, a new airport for Madrid and law courts in Bordeaux. In London he created the Millennium Dome, Terminal 5 at Heathrow and the remarkable Lloyds Building.

At the last, the Lutine Bell – customarily used to announce the loss of a ship at sea – was rung to mark his passing in December 2021. During the ceremony, Lloyd’s Chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown cited the Latin inscription for Christopher Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘If his memorial you wish to see, look around you.’ But Wren’s less well known first sentence is just as appropriate: ‘He worked not for himself but for the public good.’ M

From top Rogers’s living room; The Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste, Provence; the Lloyds of London atrium; Rogers and Renzo Piano at the Centre Pompidou