Designing the Future.(Interview)

Byline: Cathleen McGuigan

British architect Richard Rogers first seized the international spotlight in 1971 when he and Renzo Piano beat out 680 entries with their outrageous design for the Pompidou Center in Paris. Their brash building--its brightly colored tubes, ducts and pipes exposed on the outside--landed in an old neighborhood like an alien spacecraft. Not long afterward, Rogers began his own practice in London, where he once again rocked the old guard with his gleaming, stainless-steel Lloyd's of London headquarters slapped down among the dowdy office buildings of the financial district. Though he now carries a British title--Lord Rogers of Riverside--the 73-year-old architect is actually Italian by birth (his great-grandfather Rogers was an English dentist who settled in Venice); the family moved to England on the eve of World War II. Not that it matters--Rogers's outlook is clearly global. And on June 4 he'll be officially awarded the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. In honoring him, the Pritzker jury cited his consistent pursuit of "the highest goals of architecture" and his "unique interpretation of the Modern Movement's fascination with the building as machine." He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Cathleen McGuigan. Excerpts:

MCGUIGAN: You've spent a big part of your career devoted to master planning, thinking about cities and working with the City of London. That's an unusual trajectory for a "star" architect.

ROGERS: I always say, I love cities. I am an urban person; I very much believe in city-states. I was born in Florence, a city-state if we look back 500 years. But I do think cities have a very important role in our society, and I have done a lot of work on the regeneration of cities. When this [British] government came into power, the deputy prime minister asked me to chair a group called the Urban Task Force, to examine the state of our cities. We came up with about 105 recommendations, and they are very much part of the policy now of how we develop compact, well-designed, environmentally conscious cities with good public transport. I've been trying to make that link between the quality of architecture and the quality of public space and the vitality of cities--and quality of life.

I'm now the chief adviser on architecture and urbanism to the mayor of London--and the first thing he asked me, in 2001, was to try and develop some of those policies. I'm talking about what is called the urban renaissance ... The first thing is to make cities more people-friendly--and to rebalance the relationship between cars and people, and give the priority to people. That means public transport.

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