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We'll always have Paris: 30 years on, Richard Rogers comes home to the Pompidou Centre

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2008 by Catherine Slessor

Paris currently belongs to Richard Rogers--or, mindful of the succession plan, Rogers Stirk Harbour as we must now learn to call them. Yet within this newly constituted supergroup, there can be no doubt as to the identity of the lead singer. The spruced-up Pompidou, itself now 30, forms the venue for a 40th anniversary festschrift, from the heady, hippy days of Team 4, to Barajas, Heathrow and beyond. It's quite a trajectory. For those at architecture schools in the late '70s (such as your correspondent), the duelling High-Tech gurus of Rogers and Foster supplied the architectural soundtrack to our student lives as we wrestled to put the guts on the outside of the building, regardless of the wilful impracticality of it all. The original competition drawing for the Pompidou is a particularly Proustian moment; a fragrant madeleine of Rotring ink on curdled tracing paper. Like something dashed off in the lunch hour, the building is reduced and abstracted to a grid of diagonal bracing as Richard and Renzo recast Cedric's Fun Palace for the Rue Beaubourg. Tellingly, no one has ever attempted a Son of Pompidou (whatever happened to column-free space?), but thirty years on, it has long moved beyond the shock of the new and the Himalayan challenge of maintenance to become a highly cherished, bonkers-but-brilliant part of Paris's cultural and physical landscape. To paraphrase Wren's epitaph 'If you seek his monument, look around'.

From such strange seeds sprang a truly meteoric career, arcing through the white heat of High-Tech (Fleetguard, Inmos, Lloyd's) to be transmuted into something altogether richer and stranger when the fetish for industrial sheds and yachting details as a substitute for tectonic expression began to wear thin. Despite the odd Brobdingnagian lapse (notably the Dome, but reborn as a music venue the nation is now taking to its collective bosom), Rogers' output has an enviable consistency of thought and application. In the '90s he audaciously melded green concerns with High-Tech to beget Eco-Tech and kept ahead of the game by devolving into planning, urbanism, landscape and politics. He also cultivated an urbane, televisual bonhomie that consistently espoused the virtues of social inclusion, civil society and cafe culture. And though like all architects of un certain age, you sense a gradual plateauing out as offices and waistlines expand, Barajas proved that the Rogers mojo was still working. Who else could reinvent the airport, that most ghastly of modern building types, as a luminous oasis peppered with rainbow columns sheltering under a cosy timber blanket? Bring on Terminal 5.

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And therein lies a problem. The English diseases of obfuscation and meanness underscored by a masochistic penchant for bureaucracy meant that while Barajas was built in the twinkling of a Spanish eye, Heathrow has sputtered and lumbered like a crippled jumbo, picked over and dissected by the mother of all public enquiries. If anyone can rise above such a debilitating fracas, then it is Rogers (Lloyd's and the Dome were also uneasy rides), but you wonder that his bonhomie and appetite for building are still intact. As with other tall architectural poppies, the UK has not been an especially receptive milieu and much of his best work has been in more accommodating foreign pastures--the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Bordeaux Law Courts, Pompidou, Barajas, Kabuki-cho in Tokyo. As if to underline this, Paris got first peek at the anniversary jamboree, which is due to wend its way to London's Design Museum later this year.

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Set in the glazed fish tank of the Pompidou's ground-floor exhibition space, with the fourth arrondissement as set dressing, the Rogers trajectory is loosely structured around a series of themed sections. Each informal cluster (Transparent, Green, Public, Urban and so on) is colour coded for visual and intellectual legibility, but it's a classic curator's conceit, as clearly many of the buildings could fit into or straddle across other categories. As ever, the models steal the show, backed by an array of drawings, photographs and newly fashionable electronic presentations. Anchoring the displays is a nodal enclave of squidgy pink seating designed to encourage interaction with a chained library of books and magazines. A timeline beats out those four decades, with the prehistory perhaps the most curiously touching--Rogers and Foster in furry hats at Yale, Renzo in flares, all our yesterdays--and then the Pompidou moment when things changed forever with that piece of yellowing tracing paper.

What makes great architects great? Some think that Foster's provincial origins inculcated in him a flinty desire to excel, but Rogers was even more of an outsider, being both foreign (Italian, in post-war Britain) and dyslexic. You don't doubt that puts a measure of iron in the soul, but if so, he has worn it well.

At Pompidou Centre until 3 March, www.centrepompidou.fr then at the Design Museum, London, from 24 April until 10 August www.designmuseum.org