Richard Rogers

For an exhibition organized by London’s Royal Academy in 1986, architect Richard Rogers produced a new vision of the city dubbed London As It Could Be. The project gave Rogers an opportunity to imagine a near-complete transformation of central London. In an accompanying text, he wrote that the purpose of a city is "for the meeting of friends and strangers in civilized public spaces surrounded by beautiful architecture," and his installation of plans and models was a wonderful visualization of that statement. Think of it as sci-fi humanism: remaking the city to frame what humans should really be.

London As It Could Be presented visitors with enormous structural masts anchored on the banks of the Thames, from which future offices and living spaces could be hung. A pedestrian superbridge would span the river, with new walking routes opened up between Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. This would create a city built to serve not the spatial needs of the automobile industry but the cultural needs of its living residents.

Lord Richard Rogers, born in 1933 in Florence, Italy, a 1962 graduate of the Yale School of Architecture, and recipient of the 2007 Pritzker Prize, is most often associated with a generation of British architects, including Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw, and James Stirling, known for their structurally bold and technologically expressive work. London As It Could Be showed off the most socially beneficial impulses behind this high-tech design strategy, revealing Rogers’s ability—often more sharply honed than in the work of his peers—to explore a different kind of sustainability, one intimately connected to the experiential fabric of the city.