Richard Rogers: Observations on Architecture

Though a building must be complete at any one stage, it is our belief that in order to allow for growth and change it should be functionally and therefore visually open-ended. This indeterminate form must offer legible architectural clues for the interpretation of future users. The dichotomy between the complete and the open nature of the building is a determinant of the aesthetic language. We design each building so that it can be broken down into elements and subelements which are then hierarchically organised so as to give a clearly legible order. A vocabulary is thereby created in which each element expresses its process of manufacture, storage, erection and demountability; so that, to quote Louis Kahn, each part clearly and joyfully proclaims its role in the totality. "Let me tell you the part I am playing, how I am made and what each part does", what the building is for, what the role of the building is in the street, and the city.' ... I believe in the rich potential of modem industrialist society. Aesthetically one can do what one likes with technology for it is a tool, not an end in itself, but we ignore it at our peril. To our practice its natural functionalism has an intrinsic beauty. The aesthetic relationship between science and art has been poetically described by Horatio Greenough as: 'Beauty is the promise of function made sensuously pleasing.' It is science to the aid of the imagination... We are searching for a system and a balance which offers the potential for change and urban control; a system in which the totality has complete integrity yet allows for both planned and unplanned change. A dynamic relationship is then established between transformation and permanence, resulting in a three-dimensional framework with a kit of changeable parts designed to allow people to perform freely inside and out. This free and changing performance of people and parts becomes the expression of the architecture... (pp 12-13) The architect must understand and control the machinery - the instruments that build buildings where necessary developing and inventing new ones... Only by studying and controlling the means of production and by creating a precise technological language will the architect keep control of the design and construction of the building. The correct use of building process disciplines the building form, giving it scale and grain... Today problem solving involves thinking at a global scale and using science as the tool to open up the future. Science is the means by which knowledge is ordered in the most efficient way so as to solve problems... (p16) The building form, plan, section and elevation should be capable of responding to changing needs. This free and changing performance will then become part of the expression of the architecture of the building, the street and the city. Program, ideology and form will then play an integrated and legible role within a changing but ordered framework. The fewer the building constraints for the users, the greater the success; the greater the success the more the need for

revision and then programmatic indeterminance will become an expression of the architecture... (p 19)

Jean-Louis Cohen: Composition according to Rogers

Richard Rogers's first residential projects possessed great conceptual clarity. He alluded to Mies van der Rohe with his House in Wimbledon (1968-9) and evoked the settlements then being imagined for distant planets with his project for the Zip-up House (1969-71). Imbuing his designs with a sense of modular composition no matter the scale, he continued to leave all the pipes exposed on the exterior as at the Centre Pompidou. (The British television program Spitting Image satirized him with a puppet whose intestines were hanging out.) This approach led him to build hangars with cable-stiffened structures such as those for the Fleetguard Factory in Quimper, France (1979-81), the INMOS Microprocessor Factory in Gwent, Wales (1982-7), and the PA Technology Center in Princeton, New Jersey (1982-5). All displayed a certain classicism by virtue of their symmetry, the similarity between their front and back elevations, and the rigorous treatment of their corners. The Lloyd's Building (1978-86) 556 in the City of London marked a significant change of scale in Rogers's work. This large structure was conceived by Rogers as an open space with floors branching out from a central atrium. At its heart is the insurance company's famous Lutine Bell, surrounded by the servant spaces of the circulation cores and utilities. The building recalls nineteenth-century department stores and, even more literally, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, especially with its semicircular tympanums. From this building on, Rogers has worked mostly on large public buildings, abandoning any residual classicism in favor of more expressive solutions, as in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (1989-95) and his ourthouse in Bordeaux (1993-6), whose chambers are located in rooms evoking oversized wine vats. Rogers designed the gigantic Millennium Dome in Greenwich, England (1995-9), a fabric membrane suspended from a network of steel cables and masts, which long failed to find a use commensurate with its structural ambitions. Richard Rogers's general method is first to work out his projects in section, next to define a basic modular unit to be repeated according to a grid or linear sequence, and then to generate the complete building, as exemplified in his terminal at Barajas Airport in Madrid (1997-2005) 555 with its wave-shaped roof.

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers: Statement

Ideology cannot be divided from architecture. Change will clearly come from radical changes in social and political structures. In the face of such immediate crises as starvation, rising population, homelessness, pollution, misuse of non-renewable resources and industrial and agricultural production, we simply anaesthetise our consciences. With problems so numerous and so profound, with no control except by starvation, disease and war, we respond with detachment. Today, at best, we can hope to diminish the coming catastrophe by the recognition of the existing human conditions and by rational research and practice. The importance of technology is in the application of method to technique, whether one is talking of sophisticated or primitive technology. The aim of technology is to satisfy the needs of all levels of society. Technology cannot be an end in itself but must aim at solving long term social and ecological problems. This is impossible in a world where short term profit for the

'haves' is seen as a goal, at the expense of developing more efficient technology for the 'have nots'. All forms of technology from low energy intensive to high energy intensive must aim at conserving natural resources while minimising ecological, social and visual damage to the environment, so that by using as little material as possible as functionally as possible to answer new briefs, we reach a self-sustaining situation where input = output. A new distribution of end and means is needed, not based purely on a limited financial evaluation of human needs. In this context it is as difficult to create a truly socially orientated brief as it is to adapt and translate it by the use of the correct technological means ... Much of our work has the following common factors: a. Analysing and broadening the brief to create an environment which will offer maximum freedom for man's many different activities. Reassessing traditional hierarchies and relationships between public and private, work and relaxation, child and adult, vehicular and pedestrian, worker and manager, quiet and noisy, dangerous and safe. Each overlapping realm requires special conditions to sustain and encourage it. b. Single undefined common spaces. c. Allowance for growth and change. d. No major differentiation in the section and facade except in the direction of growth as in clear span structure. e. Control of programme, quality and cost by the use of standard catalogue pieces and the elimination of craft techniques and wet trades ... f. Maximum exploitation of minimum industrial materials. g. Use of skilled erection teams. h. Building forms and dimensions dictated by maximum economic spans and standard production limits of components. High thermal insulation and general environmental control by the use of sophisticated panel systems... j. Skin, structure and services clearly defined. k. Internal and external elements demountable and reusable. Use of bright colors to give order, happiness and to break down technological connotations. m. Breakdown of traditionally hierarchical planning, replaced by work flow planning. Piano and Rogers, Statement from Architectural Design, vol XLV; no 5, 1975.

Jean-Louis Cohen: Experimentation according to Piano

Renzo Piano followed a rather different path, taking less interest in composition per se than in devising distinctive details characteristic of each project. His work started with the polyester panels and steel braces of his Italy Pavilion at the Osaka World's Fair (1970). Then, at the Centre Pompidou, he developed the "gerberette" - a cantilevered arm connecting the steel columns to the floor-carrying trusses and wind bracing which condensed the spatial and technical solution into a single component. His simplest museum to date, and one of his most successful, is the Menil

Collection in Houston (1982-6), a one-story box with opaque elevations, top-lit by a network of three hundred adjustable "leaves" in glass-reinforced concrete that serve to temper the bright Texas light. The experimental research of Piano's architectural firm - RPBW, or Renzo Piano Building Workshop - has been carried out with full-scale models, leading to several different families of buildings and to structural solutions that have usually been defined by a guiding metaphor. The Kansai International Airport on an artificial island in Osaka Bay (1988-94) 557 resembles a wave extending along the runways for just over a mile, although it may also be compared to the wing of a glider, beneath which the terminal's operations are carried out. In the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Noumea, New Caledonia (1991 - 8), arches of laminated wood reinterpret native Kanak huts, and they also give the complex the appearance of a group of masks, especially when viewed straight-on from the water. The same laminated wood concept was used for the tall arches of the Bercy II Shopping Center in Paris (1987- 90), over which a metal skin is stretched, resulting in a structure whose interior resembles that of the whale in Walt Disney's Pinocchio. Piano has approached the question of cladding from several different angles. For his residential complex on Rue de Meaux in Paris (1988-91), he used prefabricated "leaves" in fiberglassreinforced concrete to which a terra-cotta facing was clipped. He further developed this system for his first skyscraper, the DEBIS tower on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz (1992-9). In Berlin as well as in subsequent skyscrapers, like Aurora Place in Sydney (1996- 2000) and the New York Times Building in Manhattan (2000-8), Piano extended the principle of servant and served spaces vertically, at the same time giving a genuine tectonic complexity to the building skins. With his conversions of industrial sites such as the Schlumberger Factory in Montrouge (1981-4) and the Lingotto Factory in Turin (1983- 2002), Piano endeavored to clarify the process of transformation by preserving the original buildings' spatial and structural qualities. This attention to the relationship between building components has also been characteristic of his many projects for cultural institutions in Europe and, increasingly, the United States, where he developed a reputation as deus ex machina, able to solve the most complicated problems. The Beyeler Foundation Museum in Riehen, near Basel (1992-7), in which opaque walls divide up a space underneath a floating roof, further elaborates the theme of the Menil Collection. The small Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, with its five parallel bays, derives from the same approach. In the Parco della Musica Auditorium in Rome (1994-2002), the walls enveloping the lobbies and auditoriums express a sort of "wallness" that seems inspired by antiquity, while the lead-coated wood shells sheltering the three music spaces are in an Expressionist vein, reminiscent of Hermann Finsterlin's mysterious animal-like fantasies.