It took place on a warm summer evening at the practice’s old offices in Hammersmith, bringing together a range of people reflecting the wide and disparate world which Richard inhabited for so many decades. Architects who spoke about their relationship to RR started with Norman Foster, recalling the start of their long relationship while graduate students at Yale, studying under Paul Rudolph; they agreed about architecture, said Norman, while disagreeing about ‘almost everything else’. If anything, their friendship increased in the years following Richard’s fall in Mexico; he spoke movingly about his last phone call, made just before a peaceful death.

Moshe Safdie spoke affectionately of RR as a best friend, while Renzo Piano recalled stories from their Pompidou Centre years – though they always called in Beaubourg (‘It took us five years to pronounce it properly, so we weren’t going to call it anything else’).

Heartfelt contributions from family members (Italian and British) were both incisive and funny, and included a film about the relationship RR had with colour; daughter-in-Lucy Musgrave gave an interesting account of the correspondence between Richard and Brian Anson, the radical architect who led the fight against redevelopment of Covent Garden after a Pauline conversion – he had previously been team leader of the Greater London Council unit helping with redevelopment. Writer Adam Gopnik had good anecdotes about life with RR on both sides of the Atlantic. London Mayor Sadiq Khan made a nice contribution, far more relaxed than in his usual public appearances.

All this was interspersed with very good musical interludes, in particular a brilliant performance of ‘What a wonderful world’ by the actor Jessie Buckley – what a voice! – and trumpet playing by Holly Clark, who later excelled with an excerpt from Haydn’s trumpet concerto. Ruthie Rogers gave a final farewell before the entire audience sang ‘You are my sunshine’.

We spilled out onto the terrace and garden of the River Café, where an endless stream of delicious plates arrived from the kitchen; the bar buzzed. It was a memorable evening, not least because of the chance it offered for many to re-connect to people they had not seen since Covid. And of course it provided a chance to talk about the Rogers legacy in the context of good food and wine, which Richard would surely have loved. No other architect could have attracted such a host of people, from rock-start celebrities to big-name clients to people who worked at the practice who RR simply liked.

He was generous to World Architecture Festival, chairing our super-jury and giving a keynote address in Singapore in 2014 – and it was generosity of spirit which made him a special person in the world of architecture.

Paul Finch with Richard Rogers at WAF 2014

Michael Hopkins RIP

Another of our great post-1945 contemporary architects has also passed: Sir Michael Hopkins, at the age of 88. A former partner of Norman Foster, he was one of the pioneer ‘high-tech’ architects (none of them really liked the phrase) who changed the face of British architecture, first with his early work combining architecture and engineering to produce lightweight and breathtaking contemporary designs, for example the house he designed with Patty Hopkins for themselves, in Hampstead, and the Schlumberger headquarters outside Cambridge. Both are now listed.

However, in later years the Hopkins office became renowned for its ability to combine new architecture with old contexts or indeed old buildings, redefining what it might mean to be simultaneously modern, but at peace with history rather than trying to fight it, or in the case of post-modernist architects, aping or caricaturing it.

Always interested in the engineering/architecture relationship, Michael’s investigations into how one might relate it to new ways of designing with timber or stone produced very distinctive work, whether at the Lord’s cricket ground Mound Stand, Norwich Cathedral, or in the brilliant synthesis of transport and workspace achieved with the Westminster Underground/Portcullis House building opposite Big Ben.

Michael was generous enough to admit that the practice’s fine velodrome for the London Olympics was the first building where he played no part in the design. But as with all great architects, the informing spirit which he brought to the office survives him, finding its place in the experienced and talented team who will continue the work.

One can say the same, incidentally, about the team who worked with Richard Rogers for four decades.

Sir Michael Hopkins CBE RA with his architectural partner and wife Patty

Books matter

WAF was part of the group, formed by the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects with the Temple Bar Trust, which initiated the Architecture Book of the Year Awards, whose category and special prize winners were announced last week.

Authors, publishers and judges attended the event, which was held in Temple Bar, a Christopher Wren building which now stands next to St Paul’s Cathedral, having been moved from the City in the 19th century but now back where it belongs, albeit in a different location.

The WCCA has its home in Temple Bar and wished this year to mark its new home, and the 300th anniversary of the death of Wren, but doing something to promote the world of books; historically, the area around Temple Bar was the home of British printing and publishing.

You will find details of the winners on our website here. We feel confident that this is a programme that will become annual. Nobody quite knows why the architectural media now avoids book reviews, but WAF loves books and will continue to promote them.

House style

Sir John Soane was probably the first British architect to make a manifesto out of his own home – and he did it not once but twice: at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and less dramatically at Pitzhangar Manor in Ealing. They initiatied a genre of ‘creative house as polemic’.

So it is fascinating to see the Soane Museum putting together an exhibition of a small selection of architects’ own houses. They are the Red House (Philip Webb for William Morris); Erno Goldfinger’s Willow Road; Michael and Patty Hopkins’ iconic steel and glass house in Hampstead, round the corner from Goldfinger; Charles and Maggie Keswick Jencks’ Cosmic House in Holland Park; and the Straw Bale House by Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till. Admittedly neither Morris nor the Jencks were, strictly speaking, architects, though all had capability for design and contributed significantly alongside the named architects, Terry Farrell in the case of the Cosmic House.

As ever with such compilations, the real pleasure comes from spotting similarities and overlaps. With the exception of the Straw Bale house, all the 20th century examples are in places where their predecessors were happy to live, Hampstead and the more salubrious parts of inner west London. More interesting are the varied natures of the polemics. Morris and Webb consciously sought to promote what became the principles of arts and crafts architecture, in composition as well as use of materials and craftwork. The Hopkins chose to refine what was already an established part of the modernist canon; the Jencks consciously aimed to disrupt that entire canon. Erno, with his legendary self-confidence, wanted to be the sole arbiter of the modernist canon.

Well worth a visit.