5Politics and Practice

The vitality and global importance of London today stands in stark contrast to the drab city Ruthie, Roo and I returned to, from beautiful, romantic Paris, in 1977 after completing the Pompidou Centre. The UK had been on the winning side in the Second World War, but had not seen the post-war investment that had buoyed continental economies.

The British Empire, which had provided London’s lifeblood for so many decades, had been all but dismantled, and the city had yet to feel the benefit of international migration or of its membership of the European Economic Community. The only espresso to be had was in Bar Italia in Soho, spaghetti was something that came tinned in tomato sauce, and olive oil was sold in chemists for cleaning your ears out. With the exception of a few Indian and Chinese restaurants, most restaurant food was disappointing at best. The UK was seen as the ‘sick man of Europe’, and London felt like an imperial capital whose time had passed, looking over its shoulder at cities like New York, while worrying about loss of business to Frankfurt and Paris.

Estates and Activism

Initially, we decided to seek out somewhere even further away from Paris – culturally and geographically – and spent a few months in California, living with Ruthie’s brother Michael (a film and TV writer and producer) while I taught at UCLA. We loved the canyons, beaches and palm trees, but I found LA too car-dominated and sprawling, lacking the humanism of more compact cities.

Ben, Zad and Ab were now teenagers, and the Lloyd’s competition was looking promising; it was time to come back to London. As the 1970s turned to the 1980s, and the harsh medicine of Thatcherism began to take effect, both Ruthie and I became more involved in the politics and public life of what was now our home city.

More interested in politics and society than in the professional hierarchies of architecture, I had given a firebrand speech at the Royal Institute of British Architects in the late 1960s, demanding that they sell off their beautiful Portland Place headquarters and move to London’s docklands, to be nearer the citizens of London. And my stint at UCLA also convinced me that, while I firmly believe that teaching is one of the most important roles in society, I wasn’t cut out for it. I preferred the cut and thrust of argument and debate; I wanted to become part of the process of making a better society, not a theoretician or a spokesman for my profession.

I started attending meetings at the Greater London Council, where Ken Livingstone and his Labour colleagues were championing unpopular minority rights causes – feminism, anti-racism, gay rights – that were then derided as ‘the loony left’. It was also around this time that I met Anne Power, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics, the heartland of the British Left, at a dinner in east London. She offered to show me round some of the estates in the area, to point out what had gone right but mostly what had gone wrong.

Professor Anne Power, a tireless campaigner for the poorest in society. Anne and I co-founded the National Communities Resource Centre, which helps people from low income backgrounds transform their lives and their communities.

I was keen to take up Anne’s offer. Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott had been a huge influence on me and a whole generation of architects and urbanists. This masterful study of east London communities examined the close bonds and intricate social structures in the tenements of Bethnal Green – where life was lived communally, on the street (because living accommodation was so cramped and dirty) – and the social and physical disruption many east Londoners had experienced when moved from familiar streets to the post-war new towns built around the edge of London.

Visiting the Isle of Dogs with Anne, and later Tottenham in the wake of the Broadwater Farm riots in 1985, I could see how the promise of the brave new world had faltered. Broadwater Farm appeared to have been designed as a ghetto, surrounded by open fields, completely cut off from any sense of the city. In the urgency of housebuilding after the Second World War, planners had lost sight of the way actual people lived, and had left them without any of their familiar social support structures. Combined with high unemployment and heavy-handed policing, the mix was toxic.

Anne’s work in the Priority Estates Project became the foundation stone for the National Communities Resource Centre, the charity that she and I set up. NCRC gives people from low-income backgrounds the skills to create and grasp opportunities – the kind of support that had helped me through my difficult school days. Grand Metropolitan Breweries bought Trafford Hall, an eighteenth-century country house set in beautiful parkland in Cheshire for NCRC, where it offers training to people from across the UK. Most of the accommodation is in 40 of Walter Segal’s self-build homes, constructed on wooden frames and insulated with old newspapers. NCRC does vital work, but it struggles for funding.

Brian Anson, radical architectural activist and campaigner, and champion for London’s public realm.

Anne is committed to society’s poorest, and to using her knowledge and her research to make the case for change. Brian Anson, who I had first encountered in the mid-1970s, was an even more radical presence. We met when I was brought in to advise the AA on the final-year project of a group of students he was teaching. These students had not designed buildings, but had proposed a programme of urban allotments on rooftops (inevitably, they were nicknamed the ‘Cabbage Patch Unit’). The AA didn’t know what to make of this. Brian and I managed to get the project through, and the students got their degrees.

Brian was a great advocate for the marginalised, through his work at the Divis Flats in Belfast, in former colliery villages and in old steel towns, as well as an excellent writer and a great friend to lost causes. When he was out of work, which was often, he would tour the country with the Architects’ Revolutionary Council and Planning Aid, talking passionately about how the poor could regain control of the built environment and the political system. He made a huge difference to my thinking and understanding of the social problems that have accumulated in the UK. He was also a far-sighted champion of London’s public realm, battling to protect Covent Garden and Hoxton Square from heavy-handed redevelopment and the erasure of character.

Culture and Civic Life

In 1980 Alan Yentob made me the subject of a BBC Arena documentary.

At the same time as becoming more engaged in politics, I could feel myself becoming more involved in civic life, even embraced by the establishment. We were no longer the ‘architectural hippies’ who had arrived in Paris in 1971, but had been appointed as the architects of the Lloyd’s Building – one of the tallest new buildings in the City of London, commissioned by an institution at the heart of the establishment. Ruthie and I were invited to Windsor Castle for dinner with the Queen and a ‘stay over’ (the Prince of Wales had yet to share his opinions on architecture with the world at that stage), and in 1980 I was the subject of a BBC Arena documentary – produced by Alen Yentob, now one of my closest friends. The following year, the Tate Gallery’s director, Alan Bowness, who I knew through his connections to the Cornish art world (he was the son-in-law of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth), asked me to join its board.

I didn’t initially think I had enough to offer, though art had always been a presence in my life, from childhood trips to the galleries of Venice and Florence, to the Brumwells’ artistic connections in St Ives and New York, to my friendship with Philip Guston, to the cultural politics of the Pompidou Centre. But the years spent on the board of the Tate were an education. Fellow board members included Tony Caro and Patrick Heron, two of Britain’s most important post-war artists and great champions of art, and we were advised by the brilliant critic David Sylvester, who became a friend and mentor – I used to visit him at his house on Saturday mornings to discuss art. The highlight of every meeting was the review of potential new acquisitions, and the informed and passionate discussion that this inspired.

With my fellow trustees following my appointment as chair of the Tate in 1984.

It was on the Tate board that I met Peter Palumbo, whose Mansion House Square development I would fight for a few years later. Peter, who became one of our closest friends (and our youngest son Bo’s godfather), was expected to take over as chairman from Lord Hutchinson. However, he made the mistake of criticising Alan Bowness in a newspaper interview, breaking one of the cardinal rules of the British establishment – never attack civil servants, as they can’t defend themselves. Peter had ruled himself out and I was asked to take over in 1984.

The Tate had some incredible collections, but there was a lot that needed shaking up. The acquisitions policy sometimes felt like it was seeking to fill gaps on the wall, rather than select the best of the best. The institution had always been conservative: a great opportunity had been missed in the 1930s, when two board members (one of whom was John Maynard Keynes) were sent over to France with a budget of £3,000. They came back with a few paintings, but half the money unspent. They were congratulated for this, though they had passed up the opportunity to build a collection of significant impressionist art at reasonable prices. When I joined, modern art was still overlooked, and the gallery itself was in a very bad state.

I had seen how museums in the USA were driven by philanthropy and fundraising, with appointments to boards of major galleries substituting for the UK honours system. In France, culture was regarded as a national priority. The Tate seemed to have the worst of both worlds: it still felt and acted like a department of the civil service rather than an entrepreneurial institution, but was viewed as a backwater rather than something vital to the cultural life of the nation.

Nick Serota, director of the Tate from 1988 to 2017, transformed the gallery and the London art world.

We began to change things. Peter Palumbo set up a new foundation for private contributions; and when Alan Bowness retired, Arts Minister Grey Gowrie (who later made me his deputy chairman at Arts Council England) and I looked for a more dynamic replacement. Following a brilliant interview, we selected Nick Serota, who had transformed the Whitechapel Gallery, did the same with Tate Modern and would play a large part in the renaissance of the London art world. It was probably one of the best and most significant decisions I have been involved in making.

Cultural conservatism is led from the top in the UK. Margaret Thatcher encouraged our fundraising activity, but was otherwise uninterested. When Patrick Heron, Alan Bowness and I went to Moscow and Leningrad at the end of the Cold War to agree a loan of some Matisses, we were usurped at the last minute by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who had the White House intervening to press their case; Downing Street did not engage. The civil service mirrored this. Ruthie used to say, of one of the senior civil servants we dealt with, that he had a sort of extra-sensory perception. He could shake his head to say ‘No’ before you had even started speaking.

A few years after standing down from the Tate in 1989, I was talking to Tony Blair, then newly elected leader of the Labour Party, about renaming the Department for National Heritage as the Department for Culture when he came to power. Tony visibly recoiled from the word, though he did let it through in the end (though as part of a Department for Culture, Media and Sport – only in Britain would these be seen as natural companions).

From RRP to RSHP – Collaboration, Ethos and Conviviality

Richard Rogers Partnership was established when we came back from Paris. The original idea was to adopt a generic name, like Team 4, but Charles Saatchi, then at the head of the world’s largest advertising agency and a good friend, said we would be crazy to drop my name just when it was starting to get some recognition. The original directors were John Young, Marco Goldschmied and me, with Mike Davies joining us a couple of years later. We offered Laurie Abbott a directorship. ‘What the fuck would I want to be a director for?’ he responded – though he did join the partners in the end. We only had two jobs to start with – Lloyds and Coin Street – and there were no more than twenty of us, all pitching in together on new jobs as they came in, often working sixty hours a week.

Laurie Abbott, whose first passion is automotive design, is an unconventional genius who hugely influenced our architectural language.

RRP at our Holland Park studio in July 1983, around the time of my 50th birthday – we could all still fit round a big dinner table.

Our name was new but our ethos had its roots in the old days of Team 4, in its principles of equal partnership, the mixing of shared hard work with shared relaxation, and a real belief in creating a better society. The constitution that John, Marco and I drew up was based on a commitment to fairness – in distribution of earnings, in benefits and quality of life, in the work we would take on, and in equal treatment for all. We agreed to share profits between all employees and charities, and to limit the pay of the highest-paid qualified architect to a multiple (currently nine times) that of the lowest paid. We still pride ourselves on the benefits we offer, including generous maternity and paternity leave (we were trailblazers in offering the latter), language courses and private health insurance. When we established the partnership 30 years ago, these types of benefits and this type of structure were almost unheard of.

A subsidised canteen at Thames Wharf enabled us to eat together like an extended family (for some years the head chef was Sophie Braimbridge, who was previously married to my son Ab) and we are planning something similar in our new offices. In the summer we play softball against other architects every Wednesday; in the winter we hold parties and play football. We take an annual trip together to see one of our newly-completed buildings and spend a weekend eating and drinking, and thinking about our future. Everyone can use the shared holiday home (Holly Frindle, a Lubetkin-designed bungalow at Whipsnade Zoo, north of London).

The constitution is founded on shared work and shared reward, on conviviality as well as collaboration. Ever since I was a teenager, struggling at school but gathering a gang around me by the village pond in Epsom, I’ve realised that we work best when we work together. Mutual dependence is not a weakness, but something to be celebrated.

Architecture is very broad. It incorporates people who understand business as well as experts on structure, technicians who keep in touch with the latest scientific thinking, people who understand the materials and process of construction, economists, poets, sociologists, lawyers, artists and engineers. Our office brings together all those skills, and the client’s, to develop ideas.

Architects tend to stay with the practice for a long time, some for their entire careers. If someone isn’t working well in a particular team, we try to find a different project or role that will suit them better. Usually, two or three moves can find the right fit: when you recruit bright people, you just need to find the way of using them best, of accommodating personal chemistries and eccentricities, playing to each person’s strengths.

1. Our Belief

The practice of architecture is inseparable from the social and economic values of the individuals who practise it and the society which sustains it. We as individuals are responsible for contributing to the welfare of mankind, the society in which we practise, and the team with whom we work.

2. Our Aim

We aim to produce work which is beneficial to society. We exclude work related directly to war or which contributes to the extensive pollution of ourenvironment.

3. How We Work

In order to do work of the highest quality, we carefully control the size of the office and the selection of our projects. We recognise that work is not an end in itself and that a balanced life must include the enjoyment of leisure and the time to think.

4. Our Charitable Ownership

Our Practice is owned by a Charitable Trust. No individual owns any share in the value of the Practice. In this way, private trading and inheritance of shares is eliminated and any residual value is returned to society through the Charitable Trust.

5. How We Are Organised

We believe in an equitable and transparent sharing of the rewards of our work. The earnings of the directors are fixed in proportion to those of the lowest paid fully qualified architect. After reserves and tax, any profits are divided between all of the staff and charities according to publicly declared principles. We believe that these arrangements nurture an ethos of collective responsibility to each other, satisfaction in the work we produce and a sense of wider social responsibility.

6. Profit-sharing and Charity

75 per cent of our profits are distributed to partners and staff who have worked with us for more than two years, and another 20 per cent is donated to charitable causes every year, with the remainder being paid to reserves. Each director and employee directs their share of the charitable distribution to charities of their own choice. Over the years, substantial sums of money have been paid to charitable causes.

A summary of the RRP constitution, based on collaboration and a commitment to fairness. John Young, Marco Goldschmied and I devised and adopted it in the early 1980s, and it still applies in RSHP today.

The RRP directors at Creek Vean in 2003. From left to right: John Young, Mark Darbon, me, Mike Davies, Amo Kalsi, Lennart Grut, Richard Paul, Graham Stirk, Andrew Morris, Marco Goldschmied, Laurie Abbott and Ivan Harbour.

The partnership is architect-led, but with a solid core of commercial and management knowledge among the partners. Andrew Morris, who now chairs our board, joined in the early 1980s; his first role was as project architect for our house at Royal Avenue. He now leads the development of the practice as an organisation, its communications, commercial and legal teams, working alongside Lennart Grut and the finance partner Ian Birtles. I’ve known Lennart since Paris, when he and his wife lived near us, and he led the Arup team on the Pompidou Centre. He joined us in 1986 with responsibility for our overseas work.

Ben Warner has worked with us for 30 years; he set up our office in Tokyo, and now leads our work in the Far East. Avtar Lotay leads our work in Australia, and Simon Smithson, one of our subtlest thinkers, was the project architect during the design and construction of Barajas Airport T4 in Madrid, and now works on schemes across South America. Richard Paul brings knowledge, expertise and energy to complex international projects, such as Tower 3 at the World Trade Centre in New York.

The big change came in 2007, the year that I won the Pritzker Prize. I was in my mid-seventies, and the other two founding partners – John Young and Marco Goldschmied – had left. It was time to think about how the practice would evolve once I stepped back. After some discussion, the partners decided to begin the process of handing over to the next generation, so that the process would be phased and gradual. We added Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour – two of our most talented younger partners, both of whom had been with us since the Lloyd’s Building – to the practice’s name: Richard Rogers Partnership became Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, with Andrew and Lennart becoming senior partners.

The previous year, I had become engulfed in a controversy that threatened to destroy the practice. We had been asked to hold an event at the office promoting peace in the Middle East. I left the meeting early, but later some speakers had called for a boycott of Israel. This soon got into the papers in London and in New York, where we were working on a project to remodel the Jacob K Javits Convention Centre. There were calls for us to be sacked from the project, and barred from future work in New York. Ruthie and I flew over for a ghastly week of negotiation and bridge-building. We succeeded in stabilising the situation, but it was terrifying to see how quickly a firm’s reputation could be damaged by untruths and innuendo.

In 2015, there was another big change when we moved from Thames Wharf to the Leadenhall Building. We were prompted by the new owners of Thames Wharf (it changed hands following Marco Goldschmied’s departure from the practice in 2004) wanting to redevelop it. But it was also a logical move, into one of our finest modern buildings, in the heart of the City rather than in an outlying residential district. The new building enables the whole firm to work together on one floor, rather than spread out among the buildings of Thames Wharf.

The growing team photographed in front of Wren’s Royal Hospital, Chelsea.

With Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour in 2007 when we re-named the practice Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.

We have grown from being a practice of fewer than 30 people to having more than 200, which is probably as large as we should be (but I seem to remember saying that when we were 30, 50, 100, or even 12). As we have grown, we have found new ways of working together. When we started out, we all knew each other well, and could pass work and ideas back and forth, to test, enhance, challenge them, pinning up drawings and reviewing them together in our Monday design forum meetings, working like twelve hands with one brain. We ate and drank together, developing working relationships that were almost as close as family. That informal spirit has been replaced by more formal structures. We have organised ourselves into four teams, three design teams led by Ivan, Graham and me, and a strong corporate core under Andrew and Lennart. The number of partners has grown to 13, with five new partners (Tracy Meller, Andrew Tyley, John McElgunn, Stephen Barrett and Stephen Light) appointed in 2015. And the public profile of the partners is growing, with names becoming attached to specific projects.

The way we work together has undoubtedly changed, responding to growth, partners’ preferences and the impact of new technology. Computer-aided design has made a difference, boosting productivity but making design development a more private process than in the days of pinning drawings on walls. Our Monday design forum meetings now focus on managing resources as much as on reviewing designs, and the informal and bohemian culture that fired up John, Laurie, Mike, Marco, Peter Rice and me when we started out, the free flow of ideas and debate, has also evolved. But we have sustained the quality of our architecture; I think our recent buildings are among our best.

The Leadenhall Building’s distinctive sloped profile ensures unobstructed views of St Paul’s Cathedral.