At the opening of the Pompidou Centre in Paris 40 years ago, the building's co-architect Richard Rogers was standing with the crowds in the rain. A lady asked him whether he knew who had designed it. He admitted, proudly, that he was its architect. The old lady hit him over the head with her umbrella.
The Pompidou was an architectural revolution, with coloured pipes, a mess of steel and an escalator in a Perspex tube. It was compared to an oil refinery, yet it became the city's most visited attraction. It was the result of a moment in the Sixties when a group of (mostly British) architects combined their obsessions with sci-fi, Meccano, pop art and US popular culture into a jumble of idealistic ambitions for an architecture that could be flexible, fun and free. It would be mobile and its contents would be programmed by its users, not a state bureaucracy.
It never quite worked out like that, but the Pompidou remains a monument to that moment of idealism in a more equitable and democratic future.
A Place For All People is Rogers' attempt to illuminate that moment and extend its ideals into our cynical age. Part memoir, part manifesto and part list of thank yous, it is also a stab at summing up a life.
Rogers (now known as Lord Rogers Of Riverside), 84, is famously dyslexic, so this is not a book by him, but as told to his co-author, Richard Brown, which means it doesn't read like a book, rather as a series of snippets, some revealing, some inspiring, others not. There is little that isn't familiar. Perhaps an actual biographer might have squeezed more revealing stories.
This self-censoring format glosses over inconsistencies in the architect's career. If half the book is dedicated to Rogers' fight for a fairer society and a more open city, it's curious that there's no mention of his office's high-profile project One Hyde Park, a block of luxury apartments, now largely lying empty.
Yet it is indisputable that Rogers has been a force for good. His work with the Labour party led to a change in political attitudes towards the city, from dismissal ("inner city" was shorthand for neglect) to engagement.
His wife, Ruth, was instrumental in changing attitudes to food in an environment that was once a culinary purgatory; The River Café began as Rogers' staff canteen. Ruth's skills were learned beside Rogers' Italian mother, for whom Rogers built his first house, a slice of California transported to suburban Wimbledon, which has, coincidentally, just been restored and reopened as a base for Harvard design students.
Between these two buildings, in Wimbledon and Paris, we get the picture - a privileged, urbane life in which connections have conferred incredible opportunities, but also a career that embraces, arguably, some of the most fascinating and experimental architecture of the post-war era.
A Place For All People, £18.99. amazon.co.uk
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