The American Institute of Architects has announced the winners of its two highest 2019 honors – one for a designer of worldwide prominence, one for a U.S. firm distinguished for firm history as well as design. It is very timely this year that both winners are notable for social responsibility and management policies.
AIA Gold Medal to Richard Rogers
The 85-year-old Rogers has so long been known for his elegant landmark buildings that it’s tempting to say he was overdue for this AIA recognition. Based in London and designing buildings all over the world, he has previously won international design honors such as the Praemium Imperiale (2000) and the Pritzker Prize (2007), and he continues to produce exceptional architecture.
The world’s major cities are studded with Rogers landmarks, starting with the Centre Pompidou museum in Paris (1977), built to an international-competition-winning design he developed with his partner at that time, Renzo Piano of Italy (who won the AIA Gold Medal in 2008). Working from a series of subsequent firms he himself has led, Rogers has designed two of the standout structures on London’s skyline, the Lloyd’s of London building (1984) and the Leadenhall Building (2013) – the latter widely known for its tapered form as “the Cheese Grater.” Other prominent works include the Millennium Dome near London (1999), the Madrid-Barajas Airport terminals (2004), the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff (2005), and the International Towers in Sydney (2016). His first U.S. building, Tower 3 at New York’s World Trade Center site, has just now been completed.
A notable characteristic of Rogers buildings through the early years of his career was the positioning of structural and mechanical systems on the exterior. This exposure of a building’s “guts”, sometimes derided as “Bowelism,” was vividly apparent in the bold exoskeleton and colorful exterior ducts of the Centre Pompidou. Its escalator banks rising through prominent exterior tubes are also highly memorable. The same design approach was applied – with a more muted palette for its external ducts and elevator shafts – at Lloyd’s of London. In both cases, the flexibility of interior spaces – cleared of columns, ducts, and vertical circulation elements – was a significant functional advantage.
An exceptional virtue of the Rogers firm’s practice, as its nomination documents make clear, is that he and the members of his current firm are outstanding for their social responsibility and fair management policies. The firm is wholly owned by a charity and makes regular contributions to other charities; its employees share in its profits, and its partners’ incomes are capped at a multiple of that earned by the lowest-paid architect on staff.
Rogers’s personal background is notably international. He was born in Florence, into an English family that had lived in Italy since the early 1800s. His father’s cousin, Ernesto Rogers, was a world-famous architect practicing from the 1930s to the 1960s, responsible for Milan’s Torre Velasca office building and other landmarks. (He was also an influential design journalist, for many years the editor of the internationally read, bilingual Domusmagazine.) In 1939, Richard’s parents decided to return to England as World War II became imminent. He began his architectural studies at the Architectural Association School in London in 1959, then earned his master’s professional degree in 1962, not in London but at Yale. And that was followed by a brief period of employment at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York.
Among Rogers’s classmates at Yale was the English architect-to-be Norman Foster (who won the AIA Gold in 1994, among numerous honors). Upon returning to England in 1963, the two of them and their architect wives initially practiced as a foursome – unusually gender-balanced for the time – and gained praise for some modest-scaled but rigorously designed works. After that fledgling firm split up, Rogers undertook his career-launching collaboration with Piano, followed by a series of firms he would head, culminating in today’s Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.
Rogers’ architect wife Susan (“Su”) worked with him on Centre Pompidou and other projects up to the early 1970s, when they were divorced. She continued to practice architecture, with considerable distinction, until 2011.
AIA Firm Award to Payette
In bestowing this award on the firm Payette of Boston – as with last year’s Firm Award to Snow Kreilich of Minneapolis – AIA’s recognition rests not only on the high quality of their design work, but on the principles of their practice. Founded in 1932 by partners Fred Parkus and Paul Nocka, this firm was from the outset a leader in hospital planning. Since architect Tom Payette became president of the office in 1965 (at age 33), it has continued its focus on health care facilities and expanded into the design of university buildings, principally those devoted to science teaching and research.
As its range of work has expanded, the firm’s staff has grown from a few dozen in 1965 to 170 today. The process has been supported by policies that encourage multigenerational dialogue among firm members and facilitates the movement of younger associates into leadership positions.
Among the most notable of Payette’s many completed projects are: the Milken Institute of Public Health at George Washington University in D.C., noteworthy for its exterior envelope’s response to internal needs, solar exposure, and its prominence in the cityscape; the student commons at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, an effective adaptation of an existing “abandoned” space; and the Maternity Ward and Neonatal Care Unit of L’Hopital de St. Boniface in Haiti, the product of a pro bono design-build relief effort initiated by the firm. Among projects not yet completed is a 2,500-room hospital for South Central University in China, designed around an extensive Healing Garden linked to an existing public park.
A major strength of Payette in recent years has been its work in the area of energy conservation, a crucial concern in the design of hospitals and science laboratories, with their historically high energy demands. In a world where a single health care or science building can consume as much energy as a small town, the firm asserts a “responsibility to tame that consumption.” The firm’s research efforts have produced a free, publicly available Glazing and Winter Comfort tool, offering designers a way to analyze the comfort characteristics of their wall systems. Another area of expertise and exploration is the social organization of health care and research facilities, where communication and teamwork are crucial, yet some activities demand a degree of isolation.
At a time when the public’s view of architecture may be overly dominated by striking new landmarks, this recognition of efforts to improve the energy characteristics of buildings and their effectiveness as environments for human activities is welcome.
