Richard Rogers Quotations

Clearly, private developers can have different aims, and architects can only play a certain role. You can have some pretty big battles on public commissions, too. The key is to have a good client.

So I think that, yes, anything that makes it more palatable and easier to understand, such as a Virtual Centre, has to be seen as a primary activity within the educational and information global state.

Suburban sprawl leads to social atomisation and fragmentation and is environmentally disastrous, as carbon-intensive car journeys displace local shops and replace public transport.

You know, the environment is fragmenting, and the environment is, in many places, absolutely hideous!

When I started out, nearly every architect I knew was working in public practice; that's where the radical thinking was done. But, there's always a danger of looking back as our fathers did and saying, 'Things were better then.'

I am much more passionate about cities than I am about nations. The competition between cities is more civilised than between nations. There is an understanding there.

One of the things you see in New York is that offices keep their lights on at night. They're proud of their building. Great. But they must find another way to be proud without draining energy.

If I remember rightly Holland for instance has something like 45, and it's a much smaller country. In comparison we have very few and they are very badly financed.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

I like the idea of trying to influence society by taking a brief, then maybe subtly changing it or looking at it in a new way to see what interesting things can emerge.