Designs on our cities

Leading architect Richard Rogers outlines his vision for urban regeneration.

Lord Rogers, Architect

ANDREW MARR: Now Richard Rogers, or Lord Rogers of Riverside, has been called the greatest architect of the past 50 years anywhere in the world.

His early pioneering buildings like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Lloyds of London shocked and stunned the public and critics alike.

More recently, his prize-winning designs have managed to transform our experience of everyday activities like going to an airport.

He's turned his eye to proving there can be good quality, decently designed and of course sustainable architecture for all. And Lord Rogers is with me now. Welcome.

RICHARD ROGERS: Good morning.

ANDREW MARR: Beautifully dressed, as ever, Richard, if I may say so.

RICHARD ROGERS: Thank you.

ANDREW MARR: Let's start with something in the papers today. It'll surprise quite a lot of people to see that Paris is trying to learn some lessons from London, of all places, about sustainable and well designed cities, and your picture appears in that paper.

Can you tell us anything about that?

RICHARD ROGERS: Yes. First of all, London has never been better, certainly in my 70 years. The last decade, it has changed from being a city which was spiralling down, where we were really discussing only a couple of decades ago whether Frankfurt was going to be the business capital of Europe. I don't think that's likely to happen for a while.

So that's a tremendous vitality. Sarkozy invited about ten of us over to see him immediately he became President, in the first... first month, which is pretty impressive for architects to be invited. And out of this came the concept of what could we do for Paris?

And Paris has one big advantage, of course. Apart from being an amazingly romantic city, it has a great transportation system and a network which goes through Europe. We have a much less...

ANDREW MARR: Good one.

RICHARD ROGERS: ...successful one. On the other hand, they have tremendous sub...suburban problems, they have a very good mayor. And what we have been doing in London - and in England in fact - with the Urban Task Force, which I was fortunate enough to chair, is concentrating on cities, on compact cities.

Seeing that cities don't grow outwards, that there is densification around transportation hubs. They've got lots of transportation hubs. That that should also happen in the suburbs. So we're going to try to create a more environmentally, more socially mixed society...

ANDREW MARR: Very interesting.

RICHARD ROGERS: ...in the suburbs.

ANDREW MARR: Now you are well known of course for the great projects - you know the airports and the great towers and the great buildings of one kind - but your practice is actually now spending an awful lot of time making comparatively cheap houses. This is the John Prescott project, I think, where he wanted 60... a house had to be �60,000 to build and no more. Is that right?

RICHARD ROGERS: That's right, yes. Wimpey approached us and asked us to work with them. We've produced a house. There's nearly a hundred built now in Milton Keynes. It's �60,000. But equally important, shall we say, is that it is actually constructed in 24 hours.

ANDREW MARR: It's made out of paper, I read somewhere.

RICHARD ROGERS: It's wood and paper. Everything is recyclable, everything is sustainable. So it's built in 24 hours. The panels are made in about 40 hours. They need, still need the plumbing and so on.

ANDREW MARR: And they'll be nice places to live in?

RICHARD ROGERS: Well I have to say that all the people who've taken over are enthusiastic. We haven't had one complaint. Everybody who has been asked, "Would you recommend it to a friend?", each one who's bought that house said, "Yes, we would."

ANDREW MARR: If you could put up houses in 24 hours, then our housing crisis could be solved quite quickly.

RICHARD ROGERS: It's probably a month if you take it all. And also the �60,000, as you say rightly - it's the house.

ANDREW MARR: Not the land?

RICHARD ROGERS: It's not the land.

ANDREW MARR: Not the land. Yeah, sure. What about the other big story in housing at the moment, which is eco-towns - or "eco"-towns. I never know how to pronounce it. But a lot of people support these if you look at the opinion polls, but locally great hostility.

RICHARD ROGERS: Well the real problem about eco-towns is if they're, if they're outside existing towns they cannot be environmentally successful. Lots of figures - there's figures in the States and so on...

ANDREW MARR: Because people are driving in and driving out...

RICHARD ROGERS: Absolutely...

ANDREW MARR: ...and they're car based?

RICHARD ROGERS: ...and the 15,000, you know 15,000 people, which is the sort of size, you can get about one bus. You've got no shops.

It means that people are being pulled out of cities where there are schools, where there are police stations, where there are hospitals.

Emptying those out and we have to rebuild them, start rebuilding there. Environmentally, they cannot be successful in those terms.

ANDREW MARR: So it's just a pie...it's just a piece of spin or brand... re-branding really?

RICHARD ROGERS: Well they should be... You know we looked at Croydon. You can get about five eco- towns in Croydon. Start there.

ANDREW MARR: What, simply on brownfield sites already there?

RICHARD ROGERS: Absolutely, massive.

ANDREW MARR: So that's an example of, of good housing. But you've also been highly critical of the Thames Gateway, which is this huge, sprawling sort of semi-city or bits of cities and bits of towns between London and the coast.

RICHARD ROGERS: Yes, it's the most beautiful valley, the most beautiful probably practically in Europe and we're now turning it into appalling housing development sites.

They really are tacky - steel, glass, brick, whatever it is. No sense of place whatsoever. The house building is in my opinion in terms of quality of design and quality of living disastrous. We need to have a revolution.

We did it in the 80s with offices. We learnt from America. Stuart Lipton bought a new approach. We need to do this in housing. If you look at Holland, if you look abroad, they're way ahead of us.

ANDREW MARR: And what about another thing that you criticised in the same speech in the House of Lords, so-called "Dan Dare" architecture...

RICHARD ROGERS: Yes.

ANDREW MARR: ...the London skyline because there are extraordinary objects appearing all over the place. Maybe with the recession fewer of them, I wonder.

RICHARD ROGERS: I have nothing against high buildings in the right places. That is no reason... There's not much about... Usually it's not about density, though it might be in the City of London. It's about sort of the morphology of the skylines.

And I'm not... Dan Dare - I was attacking actually much more the Thames Gateway and not Canary Wharf, which I think is quite successful. I was really attacking the quality of the housing because there are some appalling blocks of flats all down the Thames.

ANDREW MARR: Yeah, yeah. What's gone wrong then because you know British architects are known around the world - yourself, Lord Foster and so on. British architecture has a very, very high reputation and yet somehow at home we don't seem to be able to build the beautiful, high density areas that we need and some of the beautiful buildings that we'd like.

RICHARD ROGERS: We still continue to think that we're going to get good quality architecture through bureaucratic structures. CABE is very good. Government set that up as part of the Urban Task Force recommendation. We don't use CABE enough. We need to use our best architects. We don't do that.

All the systems are so complex that basically you... most... most of the encouragement goes to large, bureaucratic firms of architects. They don't go for those bright ones who work abroad.

ANDREW MARR: And what's your feeling about the, the 2012 Olympics project because clearly Beijing, with that extraordinary, beautiful bird's nest creation and many other things, is going to have a great legacy?

RICHARD ROGERS: Yeah. I'm not sure whether they will have a great legacy, but it certainly has been a tremendously successful Olympics. My interest, especially working with Ken Livingstone and now with Boris, is what is the legacy, what is the future? We're looking at four of the poorest boroughs in Western Europe, so how can we look at that over a 100 year period? That's what's going to be exciting and I think there will be.

There'll be new parks and so on. There is a tremendous potential there. On the other hand, the Olympics - I think the buildings will be good. One or two will be very good, but they're not going... they're not the sort of money... We haven't got the sort of money that the Chinese do. This has been very much a question of we've got very little money, we get very concerned about money; our quality is not... it's okay. Overall, I'm optimistic. It'll be alright.

ANDREW MARR: Alright. Richard Rogers, Lord Rogers, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

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