Designed to last: Richard Rogers

At 74, Richard Rogers is as busy as ever shaping the future. Slippers are not an option

By Tom Dyckhoff

And before you ask, no, I’m not going to retire.” You can forgive the preemptive strike. Richard Rogers, Lord Rogers of Riverside to give him the grand title he rarely uses, has fielded a lot of questions about the “r” word lately. The young Turk who gave the world those once futuristic, still shocking buildings with their guts hanging out – Paris’s Pompidou Centre, London’s Lloyd’s Building – nowadays, at 74, looks like nothing more radical than your favourite grandpa, the one with the twinkly eyes and endearingly rambling tales about the war – the war against the Prince of Wales, architectural conservatism and cities gone to the dogs.

He’s reached “that retrospective time of life” – later this month a massive exhibition of his life’s work opens at the Pompidou, marking the building’s 30th birthday – so “they expect you to pop off at any minute”. Rumours mounted after a remarkable year so backed up with plaudits – the Stirling Prize last autumn for his Madrid airport, the Pritzker Prize, and the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, for starters – you half-wondered if the juries had got wind of his imminent demise. Final proof? Last year, the name of the firm he established 29 years ago, Richard Rogers Partnership, was changed to Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners, to honour the next generation of young Turks – Ivan Harbour and Graham Stirk – increasingly taking the reins. Slippers and cocoa seemed certain. “Can you imagine?” he breaks out into one of his guffaws, as if the very idea was the most ridiculous thing in the world. “Which it is.” That’ll be a no then. “

I enjoy life too much,” he says. And Rogers really does seem to have a lovely life. His place in history is guaranteed by the Pompidou and Lloyd’s. He still has fulfilling work – more than ever, with Heathrow’s Terminal 5 opening next spring, a City skyscraper, Leadenhall Building, in the offing, and his largest building to date, the Javits Centre in Manhattan, on the drawing board. It’s a buzz of activity in an office which, a few years previously, seemed in hiatus compared with that of his friend and eternal rival, Norman Foster.

His treasured roles as Ken Livingstone’s adviser and Labour peer mean he is still hard-wired into politics, taken seriously. There’s the big artsy family: still on good terms with his first wife Su, five sons all in influential, creative, fulfilling jobs (one, Abe, has designed the exhibition). There’s the lovely office by the Thames in Hammersmith, filled with 180 reverential staff. And, icing on the cake, there’s having the River Caf� for your staff canteen just by the front door. The cherry on top? Your wife, Ruthie, runs it! Extra portions of chocolate nemesis all round!

With nearly 50 years of hindsight poured through the exhibition, his life’s work seems less about architecture than selling this Pollyannaish, liberal lifestyle to a mercenary, puritanical world. Born to creative, professional, left-wing Italian parents who escaped fascist Italy for Britain in 1938, his view of life is distinctly Italian – “Where public life and family are entwined,” he says, “as long as I was sitting at the family table everything was OK. I was very affected when I was 5, in Florence, and I’d look across the street and see this caf�, and every morning I saw what I assumed was an accountant, who’d come in, they’d put a table on the pavement, they’d give him a phone, and he’d do his job. And I thought that’s what I want to do. Not to be an accountant, of course. But the idea that you could mix in your lifestyle, your work, your city, your quality of friendship.”

His wish came true. There are few architects who live the worlds they espouse quite so wholeheartedly as Rogers. Foster – with whom he started in business in the early 1960s – may now have the thousand-strong design-factory, but Rogers, you suspect, has the nicer life. Rogers’s high-tech, drenched in old-fashioned modernist optimism for this thing called “society”, has soul and colour, Foster’s has rigour, but no passion. Indeed, once you get past the shock value of his eviscerated buildings, Rogers’s architecture isn’t really about looks at all. He despises the word “style”, instead his buildings – and this is what was so radical about Pompidou – are basically big family tables, public spaces in which people come together arguing, sharing, resolving differences, given form by the life inside. His vision for cities, now applied patchily as government policy, is all about public space, generosity, tolerance.

Not everyone has shared the Rogers vision: the architecturally conservative, for instance will never warm to his Heath Robinson buildings. There are those who quite rightly state that his “guts on the outside” aesthetic was never very practical (he hasn’t used it himself in a while).

Last year his support for Palestine nearly cost him the Javits job in New York. “The office constitution states you have to think before taking on work which is antienvironment, military, and so on. But then people say ‘airports?’ In that case, since an architect alone cannot stop airports being built he should make them as good, as environmentally sound as possible. But it’s a difficult excuse to make. All architecture is political. All work involves debate, compromise. You’re always juggling, questioning yourself.” This is what makes him unique in Britain, where architects, eyes on realising their monuments and plumping the bank balances tend, as far as possible, to eschew politics.

Rogers marched for CND in the 1950s, against Bush in the Noughties. When Margaret Thatcher started dismantling the public realm so dear to him, private politics became professional. The crux came while designing “London as it could be”, highlight of the Royal Academy’s 1986 exhibition, Foster Rogers Stirling, which envisaged London as a Thames-side playground – fantastical at the height of the no-such-thing-as-society era. Thereafter, building took a backseat to campaigning for Britain’s “urban renaissance” through the Reith Lectures, new Labour’s Urban Task Force, battling with John Prescott, and, today, Livingstone. He concedes that he is somewhat on his own: “I do sometimes feel like an eternal refugee.”

When he arrived in 1938, “there was only one espresso machine in London”. Now, he thinks, we’re at last starting on the right road towards civilised life and decent coffee for all. . . Pollyanna again? “There are a lot of big ifs: the distribution of wealth is horrific. But overall, what an evolution – life is a lot better, especially for those of us who are more fortunate. For those who are not, life is tough. But what can an architect do for them?” his voice trails off. “I don’t know... ”

Richard Rogers + Architects, Pompidou Centre, Paris (www.centrepompidou.fr 00 331 44 78 12 33), from Wed, until March; the exhibition moves to the Design Museum, London SE1, in April.

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Tecno Brega

A music scene called Tecno Brega making use of an alternative business model has emerged in the city of Belem in Brazil. This parallel music industry has been active for years and has achieved great success. Several hundred new Tecno Brega records are produced and released every year by local artists, with both the production and distribution taking place outside of the mainstream music industry. The tecno brega model is simple: the music lies outside the realm of traditional copyright and is used as a method of marketing events. Every weekend the “sound system” parties attract thousands of people to the outskirts of Belem to listen to the Tecno Brega music. The parties are advertised by the distribution of the music itself. The numbers are incomplete, but the Belem scene alone brings in yearly revenues of several million US dollars.

The Tecno Brega music is “born free” in the sense that copyright protection is not a part of the business model developed by its creators. The CDs sold are utilized as marketing material– advertisements for the highly popular weekly “sound system” parties. The Tecno Brega CDs are sold by local street vendors as per arrangements with the local recording studios. At a mere US$1.50, the CDs are highly affordable by the local population, thus providing greater access to the music at a grassroots level.

The goal is not for artists to make money on conventional CD sales. Instead, the price charged works exclusively as an incentive for the local vendors to sell the CDs and in effect market the tecno brega parties. The artists thus make money through innovative business models related to the sound system parties. One such example consists of artists recording their live concert sets at the parties in real time and then selling the recordings at the conclusion of the event. This enables the audience to go home with a souvenir of the concert they have just attended. Another technique utilized by the artists is to acknowledge the presence of various people and neighborhoods in the course of the live presentations. Hearing such acknowledgment is greatly valuable to the audience– naturally people want to hear a “shout out” to them, their friends, or their neighborhood. As a result, thousands of people buy copies of the live CDs to have a permanent memoir of this form of homage.

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I have 200 orgasms every day...

PRETTY Sarah Carmen is a 200-a-day orgasm girl who gets good, good, GOOD vibrations from almost anything.

The rumble of a train on the tracks, the purr of a hairdryer, the rhythmic drone of a photo-copier are all enough to make her go oh oh oh, ahhhhh.

She had FIVE orgasms during our 40-minute interview. But I can't take the credit—it was just talking about her sex life that set her off.

Sarah, 24, suffers from Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), which increases blood flow to the sex organs.

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OF SARAH’S INTERVIEW
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She said: "Sometimes I have so much sex to try to calm myself down I get bored of it. And men I sleep with don't seem to make as much effort because I climax so easily."

As she chatted, Sarah became increasingly flustered.

"Sorry, you'll have to excuse me for a minute. I'll be with you in a sec," she mumbled before letting out a long sigh.

Sarah, from London, developed PSAS after being prescribed anti-depressants at 19.
Stunned

She believes her condition was brought on by the pills.

She said: "Within a few weeks I just began to get more and more aroused more and more of the time and I just kept having endless orgasms.

"It started off in bed where sex sessions would last for hours and my boyfriend would be stunned at how many times I would orgasm.

"Then it would happen after sex. I'd be thinking about what we'd done in bed and I'd start feeling a bit flushed, then I'd become aroused and climax.

"In six months I was having 150 orgasms a day—and it has been as many as 200."

She and her boyfriend split— and new partners struggle to keep up with her sex demands. "Often, I'll want to wear myself out by having as many orgasms as I can so they stop and I can get some peace," she said.

Sarah is a beautician and working in salons filled with whirring hairdryers and skincare gadgets can cause problems.

"If I start coughing and run to the loo, the girls know to fetch the client a magazine or a cup of tea," she said, adding, "Sometimes I'd like to just have a normal life."

All together now, aaaahhhhh!

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Ever Wonder What the Staff Eats at a Chinese Restaurant?

A little after nine o'clock, Ricky Ker sits down for dinner at a back table of Goodies, his restaurant on East Broadway, with a waitress or two. The only customers in the plain, small dining room are a young couple and a few Russian tourists—they might have come because the Shanghainese food is recommended by Zagat, and the soup dumplings are a must-order. The staff, however, is dining tonight on winter melon soup and a plate of stir-fried pork liver and stomach. "We always have one soup and one dish," head waitress Jojo explains. Ker likes white pepper in his soup, and shakes some into a visitor's cup as well. The winter melon, a big, bland fruit, has been shredded and boiled in water and salty chicken stock, with a healthy dose of cilantro tossed in at the end. It's simple, cheap stuff, but tasty.

When it comes to the various pig elements, Ker grins and offers just a taste in case it doesn't go over well with the outsider. But the innards, particularly the tripe, are delicious. The liver is aggressive, cut into thin, triangular, iron-intensive slabs, but the pieces of stomach are tender and mild, tasting fatty and carrying the soy sauce and ginger nicely. Slices of hot green pepper break the intensity, and the visitor has seconds. Jojo, who has been at Goodies for two and a half years, says she tries not to eat too much organ meat anymore because "you get everything the animal ate, and they have chemicals now." Ker laughs at this, pointing to her plate. "You're eating liver, though." Yes, she giggles, "but not every day."

The staff communicates mostly in Mandarin, but Ker and Jojo, plus two of the three other waitresses, are from Malaysia. Ker came to New York in 1998 and, through an employment agency, got a cashier job at the original Goody's in Rego Park. When the owners opened a Manhattan location in 2000, Ker was transferred to Chinatown, still working as a cashier. But four years later, when the place was struggling financially, Ker saw an opportunity and worked out a deal to take over the lease. He changed the spelling and even had it trademarked last year, but, wisely, he kept the cooks.

Ker's oldest daughter now has a master's degree in global economy, and he sounds like he's been studying the same subject. He talks a lot about marketing and came up with a slogan for the place: "Good food, good times, good luck, at Goodies." When diners get their bill at the end of a meal, it's delivered with a scratch-off lottery card—that's the luck part. Once, someone won $500. The Russian tourists win some money, but they leave it for the staff.

Tonight, Jojo and another waitress, Kimberly, feel like making dessert for family meal: a room-temperature soup of oats, brown sugar, and water. At a quarter to 10, when all the customers are gone, Jojo divvies up the tips. But the food is good to the last drop: The newest waitress stands in the back, draining the last of her sweet soup from a plastic container.

[via villagevoice.com]

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Mellowing Out on Marijuana

Those Rocky Mountains are getting higher. Two municipalities — Denver, Colorado, and the small town of Hailey, Idaho — passed pro-marijuana measures on election day this week, joining a growing number of liberal localities that are reducing or removing penalities on using pot. It's part of a slowly evolving populist rehabilitation of the drug. San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Monica in California, along with Missoula, Montana, and Seattle, Washington, have previously passed laws that give the lowest priority to enforcing existing marijuana laws.

Federal regulations, which supercede local ordinances, continue to prescribe heavy penalties — even in some cases death — for major dealers of illegal drugs, including marijuana. The federal penalty for possession of even a miniscule amount is a misdemeanor punishable by one year in prison and $1,000. Penalties are higher with cultivation, sale and crossing state lines. However, magistrates generally use state and local laws as sentencing guidelines — unless there is federal intervention, which doesn't occur in every drug case because they would increase court time and costs.

Read the full article on time.com here.

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