grandfather felt that I should become a dentist, like him, but my lack of A levels fortunately ruled that out. Indeed my academic record had led one careers adviser to suggest a job with the South African police force, perhaps feeling that my boxing skills would be useful, but ignoring the fact that my political beliefs made this just about the least likely career path I would ever take.
My grandfather, Riccardo Geiringer, after whom I was named.
So, to buy myself two more years I joined the army to do my National Service in late 1951, rather than postponing it till after further education. Like everyone else at St John’s, I had been a member of the Cadet force, but had got into trouble for refusing to obey another boy’s order to carry a Bren gun (a bulky machine gun) while on exercises. This trivial insubordination led to threats of a court martial from one of the teachers, until my housemaster, who outranked him, told him that the idea of court-martialling a schoolboy was ridiculous. Unsurprisingly, with this record at school, it quickly became clear that I was not going to be made an officer, and I was posted to the Royal Army Service Corps. Fortuitously, I had measles when my unit was being sent out to Germany. Left behind, I persuaded the sergeant that I could speak Italian and was posted to Trieste, which was then under British and US military rule, owing to territorial disputes between Italy and Yugoslavia.
An invitation card from my cousin Ernesto showing BBPR’s designs for the children’s labyrinth at the 1954 Milan Triennale. BBPR worked on the designs with cartoonist Saul Steinberg and sculptor Alexander Calder.
BBPR’s Olivetti showroom on 5th Avenue, New York, which opened in 1954. Its futuristic displays of typewriters and adding machines were lit by striped glass lamps made in Murano.
There was probably nowhere better for me to see out my brief and undistinguished military career. My grandfather Riccardo, who was a director of the insurance giant Assicurazioni Generali, gave me a season ticket to the Trieste Opera – beginning a life-long passion for opera and classical music – and I was able to visit the family’s Villa Geiringer, designed and built by my great-grandfather Eugenio Geiringer, at weekends, travelling up on the mountain railway, playing chess and meeting their friends. Back at base, I worked on clerical duties from early mornings until lunchtime. This left time free for swimming in the afternoon, for drinking beer out of boot-shaped litre glasses, and for seeing Marta, my Yugoslavian girlfriend (who was also our secretary at the base).
Domus, the architectural magazine that Ernesto edited from 1946 to 1947.
Being in Trieste also meant I saw more of my cousin, Ernesto Rogers. He was one of the intellectual leaders of post-war European architecture, and his Milan-based BBPR was one of the best-known modern Italian practices. Ernesto had joined CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne – the foremost alliance of modernist architects) in the early 1950s, but he diverged from the absolutist position of the first generation of modernists, who saw their architectural – and social – task as one of creating the world afresh, starting with a blank slate. Ernesto challenged that concept when he took over as editor of Casabella, one of Italy’s leading architectural journals, in 1953, renaming it as Casabella Continuità, and reinstilling a sense of historical perspective. This made him unpopular with some modernists like Reyner Banham, later a good friend of mine, who Ernesto mocked for his chilly, hard-edged modernism, calling him an ‘advocate of refrigerators’.
Ernesto edited Casabella from 1953 to 1964, adding the word ‘Continuità’ to its title.
Ermesto’s blending of modernism with continuity is visible in the design of BBPR’s most famous building, Torre Velasca, a mixed-use tower in Milan near the Cathedral and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, with offices on the lower floors and flats above them. At 106m tall, Torre Velasca looms over Milan’s Gothic and baroque galleries, squares and churches; it is modern and imposing, but also responsive to context, echoing medieval Lombard castles in its top-heavy design, forming links between past, present and future. I must admit, when I first saw the plans, they looked retrograde and heavy; I immediately preferred a steel-framed alternative, which was rejected.
Torre Velasca, one of BBPR’s best-known buildings, was being designed when I worked in their Milan office.
Ernesto was a great humanist, and a fantastic writer and teacher, who opened my eyes to the fabric of the city that he loved. His lyrical letter of welcome, written to me as a newborn baby, told me, ‘Life is beautiful. Life is curious. Break through the door, listen to the world.’ He had incredible cultural breadth, and was always elegantly dressed – a bella figura. He talked of a design approach that could encompass everything dal cucchiaio alla città, from the spoon to the city. As well as making architecture, and the Bauhausian furniture that filled my parents’ Florentine apartment, Ernesto was one of the pioneers of modern urban design, thinking about urban districts as complete places, formed of continuity and change, rather than as collections of buildings in space – a concept that owes as much to Renaissance masters like Brunelleschi and Alberti as it does to modernism itself. I worked in Ernesto’s office during periods of leave, and immediately after I left the army, generally on pretty menial tasks. I did try my hand at drawing, with limited success; my drawings were hurriedly tidied away when clients visited, something that continues to this day!
I enjoyed my time at the BBPR office (a converted convent), the buzz of working with a group of committed young people creating exciting new designs in the heart of a beautiful city, and exploring the social possibilities that architecture created. I asked Ernesto whether I would be able to get into the Architectural Association, without A levels, and he told me not to worry: ‘If you are going to do architecture, it doesn’t matter where you go, just do architecture.’ But I approached the AA, and managed to persuade them that, even though I had failed my exams, my breadth of education and travelling made me sufficiently unusual to admit to their diploma course.
(From left) Luigi Figini, Le Corbusier, and BBPR partners Gian Luigi Banfi and Ernesto Rogers, photographed in 1935. Banfi, who was Jewish, died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.
Buckminster ‘Bucky’ Fuller in front of the lightweight steel and acrylic geodesic dome he designed as the US Pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal.
Joseph Paxton’s cast-iron and glass Crystal Palace, built for the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, and subsequently rebuilt in South London (shown here).
2The Shock of the New
Modernism exploded into the twentieth century, embracing medicine, science, manufacture, travel, music, visual arts, literature and architecture. Shaped and driven by industrial manufacture, mainstream modernism challenged tradition in every field of human creativity, stripping back ornamentation, dissolving form and embedding constant renewal. Like previous waves of change, it represented a belief in progress, and in the potential of innovation to transform society. Karl Marx’s famous passage from The Communist Manifesto anticipates the giddy excitement of change:
Constant revolutionising of production,