A Place for All People. Richard Rogers

      I wrote my first published article, for Domus in 1966, on the building; its transparency, its flexible use of space and its beautiful staircase all made a lasting impression on me.

      

      This play of light and shadow creates scale, and all scale ultimately comes back to human bodies, to the fingers, hands, forearms, feet and strides that defined standard measurements in the pre-metric era – when man was literally the measure of all things.

      Scale helps a building to communicate. I have always wanted to make the signals given off by buildings clear and unambiguous, to enrich the enjoyment of users and passers-by alike, to express buildings’ role in city and community. These signals should help people to understand the process of construction, navigate buildings and places, see the potential they offer for private and public life. All elements should give order, nothing should be hidden, everything should be legible – the process of manuacture and erection, the role everything plays in the building, how it can be maintained, changed, demolished, and what the building itself does or could do. Parkside has this simple expression – you can see the steel portals that hold up the house and the joints connecting the aluminium panels.

      Parkside is also suffused with colour. The insulated aluminium walls are white, the internal walls are yellow and lime, as are the steel portals that form the heart of the structure. In post-war England, it sometimes felt as if colour itself had been rationed, and that only shades of grey and brown were permitted. In this monochrome world, my mother stood out; she had always dressed in bright colours – much to my embarrassment when she dropped me off at primary school. But she clearly made an impression on me. Later, in 1957, when my father had asked Su and me to help decorate the doctors’ dining room at St Helier Hospital, where he opened the renal unit and brought the first kidney dialysis machine to the UK, we choose bright yellow, bright green, bright blue and bright red, each wall painted a different colour. These were the colours of cubism, of the work of Mondrian, Matisse and Picasso that had seemed so bright in the gloom of post-war England.

      Parkside viewed at dusk from the courtyard when my parents were living there, the steel frame and aluminium panels clearly visible.

      The dining table and chairs designed by Ernesto Rogers, with the open kitchen to the left, and furniture by Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames behind.

      Inside Parkside’s bright living space, looking out from the open kitchen, with bedrooms and the library beyond the central dining space.

      The steel portal frames are visible as slices in the ceiling. In the upper picture, my mother’s beautiful pots are arranged in ‘villages’ on the kitchen counter.

      Reflection and transparency: my mother’s mirrored dressing table in the bedroom, with the door open through to the kitchen and living room beyond.

      My mother in the study at Parkside.

      

      Travelling round the USA and Mexico, I had seen the bright colours of California, of the Case Study Houses. I had seen how colour was used in industrial architecture, to indicate function, distinguish components, or signal hazards. It seemed natural to bring all this back to London, as an additional layer of meaning – a different way of making buildings legible and transparent in their functions – but also as a form of play, a way of lightening and clarifying the formalism of imposing structures. Ancient buildings – from the Acropolis to medieval cathedrals – were much more colourful than their bleached stone tells us today. Using modern industrial components frees you to experiment with colour too: plastics are whatever colour you choose to make them. I sympathise with Gropius who, when asked his favourite colour, replied, ‘All of them!’ People are frightened about choosing the ‘right’ ones, but I don’t worry about following rules. Green can go with red or pink; if a colour is beautiful, it will go with another beautiful colour.

      Parkside originally included a consulting room for my father to continue medicine, and the separate lodge included a carport, and a studio for my mother’s pottery. The focal point of the house was an open-plan kitchen. Cooking and entertaining had always been the heart of our family life and bringing the kitchen into the living space made cooking a social activity, not a segregated chore. Over the years, my mother cooked for so many of my friends, and instilled a love of Italian food not only in Ruthie, who went on to create the River Café with Rose Gray, but in Georgie and Su too, and my sons, who are all really good cooks.

      On the other side of the kitchen counter, the house made room for the beautiful 1930s modern furniture that my cousin Ernesto had created in Italy as a wedding present for my parents. My mother’s pottery was on shelves, and walls were hung with paintings by Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron – and a prized Picasso print.

      Over time Parkside has adapted and evolved: the carport and pottery became a flat for my brother Peter, then for John Young, then the design studio of my son Ab, who moved into the house when my mother died. When Ab moved out, we gifted Parkside to Harvard, as a residential centre for their Graduate School of Design, led by Mohsen Mostafavi. Each year, six research fellows will live in the house, which has been reconfigured by Philip Gumuchdjian, who co-wrote Cities for a Small Planet with me when he was working at RRP, pursuing research into urban development, and it will also host lectures and other events. It has changed with the times, accommodating different needs and uses rather than constraining them, reflecting the architectural philosophy later summarised as ‘Long life, loose fit, low energy’.

       The Limits of Traditional Technique – Creek Vean and Murray Mews

      Su and I began work on Parkside in 1968. For five years, first with Norman and Wendy Foster, and then with John Young and Laurie Abbott, we had been working towards a new architectural language, feeling our way along a path without knowing clearly what the destination would be.

      Norman Foster and Wendy Cheesman, who married in 1964, at Team 4’s offices.

      When we returned from the USA in 1963, Norman, Su and I had set up Team 4 with my ex-girlfriend Georgie Cheesman, and her sister Wendy. At first, we worked out of Wendy’s bedroom in a two-room flat in Belsize Park. Frank Peacock, who had studied with me at the AA (literally alongside me, as our surnames made us neighbours in every class), and was a brilliant technician and draughtsman, built a box to put over Wendy’s bed, so that we could use it as workspace during the day. When clients visited, friends would be roped in to pose as architects, to make Team 4 look like a larger concern than it was.

      As neither Norman nor I had completed our training, we were not entitled to call ourselves architects. Georgie had qualified and gave Team 4 some legitimacy, but she quickly saw that Norman and I were going to be impossible to work with, so moved on. The core of Team 4 was Norman and Wendy (who fell in love with each other and married), and Su and me. Norman and I did manage to complete our registration, but only after being summoned before the Architects Registration Council for practising without a licence.

      Team 4’s first commission, Creek Vean, was both Parkside’s twin and its opposite. Like Parkside, it was for our parents – in this case, Su’s, Marcus and Rene Brumwell. Like Parkside it has now been listed as Grade II*. Like Parkside it presents a deceptively blank face to the road outside. But there