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A place for all people
A place for all peoplelife, architectureand the fair society
Richard Rogers
with Richard Brown
Published in Great
Britain in 2017 by
Canongate Books
Limited, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Richard Rogers 2017. The moral right of the author has been asserted.
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78211 693 6
eISBN 978 1 78211 694 3
Designed by Graphic Thought Facility
Other books by the same author:
A Case for Modern Architecture: The Smallpeice Lecture 1989
Architecture: A Modern View
A New London with Mark Fisher
Cities for a Small Planet with Philip Gumuchdjian
Cites for a Small Country with Anne Power
For Ruthie, the love of my life.
‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.’
John Cage
Introduction
‘Are you sitting down, old man?’ Renzo Piano asked, when I picked up the phone (he is four years younger than me). I reassured him that I was. ‘We have won the Beaubourg competition,’ he explained. ‘The announcement is in Paris this evening. We have to be there but I can’t get away from Genoa; could the rest of you fly over from London?’
We hardly had time to digest the news, let alone prepare for the dramatic change in our working lives that it heralded. My mother, who was