In the 1930s, five children were born
who grew up with dreams of building a better world.
And that's exactly what they did.
The architecture of Norman Foster, Richard Rogers,
Michael Hopkins, Nicholas Grimshaw and Terry Farrell
can be found across Britain and the globe.
In their youth, they collaborated, and their work was hailed
as a radical new style of architecture - high-tech.
In later years, they became rivals.
Their buildings were sometimes controversial,
but they turned into the most successful generation of architects
Britain has ever produced.
In this series, for the first time, all five of them tell their story.
From housing to high culture, from offices to airports,
the world we live in now is the world that they designed.
This programme contains some strong language.
If you've bought a ticket for a tourist flight into space,
the last building you'll see as you leave Earth
will have been designed by one of the most successful architects on the planet -
Norman Foster.
New Mexico is home to the world's first commercial spaceport,
both spacecraft hangar and, from 2014, passenger terminal.
Everything's all under one roof and that roof
is almost like the contours of the desert.
So environmentally,
it's very efficient.
And it brings together the drama and the excitement,
makes space travel accessible beyond the few.
In that way, it opens up a new era of flying.
I love flight. I love flying as a pilot...
..and the poetry of flying.
Um...so you can imagine the appeal of that project.
Over the past four decades,
Foster has built futuristic structures all over the world.
But to understand what inspired him,
you need to go back to post-war Britain
and the comic he read as a teenager.
I think the Eagle was the romance of technology.
There was a vitality
in the very freshness of its graphics...
..and the celebration of making things.
Back in the '60s, Foster collaborated for several years
with another architect who, like him, is now a lord.
Opposite one of Rogers' most famous creations,
the headquarters of Lloyd's of London,
his architectural practice has been building a new tower,
nicknamed the Cheese Grater.
I've always had this belief that towers,
in fact buildings, should express their structure.
Clearly, towers have a tremendous potential
because they're reaching upwards.
You've got to...you've got to have a big...a big structure.
What can you actually create which is more humanistic than just a box?
On the whole, for instance, offices are just rectangular boxes.
This tower thickens out at its base,
where seven storeys have been scooped away
to create something Rogers often campaigns for -
public space.
Rogers, like Foster,
can trace some of his architectural inspirations back to his youth.
One of my first presents, I remember,
was a tiny box of Meccano.
And I have always enjoyed Meccano.
Though Rogers and Foster
are the best-known British architects of their generation,
three of their close contemporaries have also built a global reputation.
Earlier in his career,
Michael Hopkins collaborated with Norman Foster,
just as Richard Rogers had done,
and for Hopkins too,
a '40s childhood inspired a life in architecture.
I went to school, I did absolutely no work at all
and I was always able to sort of bunk off on my bike
when other boys were playing games.
I started sort of becoming aware of buildings in the countryside
and enjoying them and feeling... feeling good about them.
I used to go out bicycling a lot.
Over 50 years later,
Hopkins Architects designed the London Olympic velodrome.
It's a Pringle, isn't it, it got called?
It's a beautiful form
and it begins to tell me something about, from the outside,
what's going on in the inside.
Buildings must be legible and easy to understand.
As you arrive into the stadium space,
you're arriving in a theatre of sport.
CHEERING
Hopkins learnt his craft
at London's Architectural Association.
One of his fellow students there in the early '60s
went on to create Britain's most visited work
of high-tech architecture - the Eden Project.
Over the last decade,
Grimshaw's firm has become a major player in New York,
building everything from a public housing scheme in the Bronx
to the Fulton Street transit interchange.
It's ten floors, three floors underground
and the key thing is
it's got a kind of opening in the top.
You can get a shaft of sunlight coming down like that...
..right down to this level here
and you get a patch of sun down there.
This is going be a great meeting place,
through which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people,
will go every day.
So the idea of making it beautiful is quite important
and I think if you're just lifting the spirits of people,
you're doing something.
And for the first 15 years of his professional life,
Nick Grimshaw's partner was Terry Farrell.
The biggest Farrell buildings in recent years
can be found in China.
Biggest of all, at 1,449 feet,
is the KK100 Tower in Shenzhen.
The tower is the tallest by a British architect.
It was the tallest building built in that year -
in other words, in 2011,
there was nothing else taller in the world built.
There aren't many like it.
It's not symmetrical both ways.
I like to think it's like a blade of grass.
MUSIC: "I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire" by The Ink Spots
# I don't want to set the world on fire... #
For Farrell, like the rest of these '30s babies,
a life in construction began with six years of destruction.
My main memories of the war
was the shelter my father built with my uncle,
and I was fascinated - here were men, doing men's things,
digging a hole in the ground,
putting this metal corrugated thing under and filling it over.
Another formative experience came soon after the war,
when Terry's family moved to a Newcastle council estate.
Their house had been built with a process
which his generation of architects would later make great use of -
prefabrication.
It was designed in an aircraft factory.
It was a steel-frame house clad in...in asbestos.
Farrell's working-class background
would give him a different perspective
to most in the privileged world of British architecture,
and he wasn't the only Northern lad in this group
to benefit from a place at grammar school.
Norman Foster and I were probably born just a couple of miles apart.
NORMAN FOSTER: It was a fairly tough neighbourhood -
I mean, an area where people worked with their hands
and if you didn't work with your hands,
if you were interested in books rather than other things,
then you were very suspect and given quite a hard time.
Richard Rogers also came to British architecture
as something of an outsider -
his family was Anglo-Italian
and his earliest years were spent in Florence.
But when his parents fled Mussolini's dictatorship in 1938,
the five-year-old Rogers got a crash course
in the English side of his heritage.
Especially in the beginning of the war,
either being Italian or German was a bad thing
and going to a small primary school,
you know, bullying was, er...prevalent, um...
So I was pretty suicidal at school,
especially in my primary school, I really was suicidal.
Being dyslexic, as I found very much later,
my aim in life was to be second from last
rather than bottom of the class for most of my life.
Hopkins and Grimshaw came from more comfortable backgrounds,
but they too were formed partly by the experience of hardship.
I know all the other architects you're filming -
of course, we all were brought up in years of serious austerity.
We had, for instance, utility furniture,
which was furniture that had to be approved by the government
for using the minimum amount of materials.
No decoration, no frills.
In 1951, however, the teenage architects-to-be
were given a glimpse of a brighter future.
# The Festival of Britain is here
# People are welcome from everywhere... #
When I went down to the Festival of Britain,
it made a big impression on me.
I particularly remember the Dome of Discovery,
which was a marvellously futuristic shape.
It was a damn good building, actually.
I mean, if you took Richard's Millennium Dome,
you could see a definite analogy, actually,
quite fascinatingly, there.
And the Skylon, which was a marvellous bit
of "look, no hands" structural virtuosity.
These were, er...perhaps even more exotic
because of the... the drab surroundings.
The whole atmosphere was determinedly sort of modernistic.
Across the rest of Britain too,
architecture quickly became the promise of a better tomorrow,
as the bombed-out nation was rebuilt.
You know, the optimism of building houses for people
that are coming back from the war, of building schools,
of building hospitals, er...of doing urban planning...
Changing the world was very much on the agenda at that time.
Britain's post-war buildings weren't nearly-new -
they were products of the modern movement.
They followed the example set since the '20s by Continental architects,
such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.
Architecture for the machine age, where form followed function
and less was more.
This kind of architecture makes no attempt to disguise itself
in a false and conventional style.
The goal of the modern movement was healthier, lighter,
better architecture for everyone.
So, at the birth of the welfare state,
modernism seemed a natural fit for public buildings.
Young people wanting to change the world saw modernism as the way
to do so, which is why Hopkins, Grimshaw and Rogers
all headed to the same place for their architectural training.
There was only one school that taught modern architecture in Britain
and that was The Architecture Association.
Every other school was teaching Neoclassicism.
Michael Hopkins found more than his education at the AA -
he also met his future collaborator and wife Patricia.
There were 400 boys and about ten girls...
so you made a beeline for the prettiest girl.
I remember Michael coming into the little cafe with very tight jeans,
washed leather jacket and a book on ballet under his arm,
um, and I thought "Urgh, what a...
"He's just showing off."
But it obviously made a mark.
Thanks to a scholarship, Terry Farrell
completed his architectural training in the United States.
JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
I had five days at sea and sailed in past the Statue of Liberty
into New York and I could see that this was a life-changer.
# Somewhere beyond the sea
# Somewhere waiting for me... #
Unusually for the time,
Foster and Rogers also made the pilgrimage across the Atlantic.
Couldn't believe our eyes.
The scale and the buildings were soaring up and down
these amazing avenues.
That certainly was a shocker.
It really knocked us out.
When I got to America I felt I'd come home.
I think it changed the way that I looked at things.
You had this feeling that everything was possible.
Terry's postgraduate studies took him to Philadelphia.
Richard and Norman enrolled at Yale,
where the two rapidly became collaborators and close friends.
Norman was a brilliant, fantastically strong draftsman,
where I could hardly hold a pencil in comparison.
When we first came together at Yale it seemed to me
that you know, Richard had all the...
the qualities that in a way I admired.
My memory of the most exciting intellectual talks
that I've ever had in my life were the ones with Norman.
We argued about how to change the world.
It was a great period and, for me, very liberating.
I did a lot of drawing, a lot of thinking,
and a lot of travelling and I really immersed myself in America.
We just worked like hell day and night, and at the end of
a project we'd just drive thousands of miles in search of architecture.
We did the trips together, went to see industrial buildings together.
The steel mills, the Airstream caravans,
Cape Canaveral, NASA, as well as the architecture.
We went to see the majority of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings...
..so we were imbued with them.
We were like sponges, you know, we were just absorbing...
this new culture.
They headed back to Britain, inspired by America's
can-do and capitalist dynamism.
Most architects in mid-'60s Britain worked in the public sector,
but Norman and Richard set up their own private firm
with their wives Wendy and Sue.
They called themselves Team 4
and set up shop in the Fosters' tiny flat.
It was a bed-sitting room in Hampstead Hill Gardens.
On those few occasions when there was a potential client,
then we had somebody who was in the kitchen, just banging a typewriter
to make it sound as if there was a lot of action going on.
MUSIC: "Get Ready" by The Temptations
Their first projects were houses,
including a group of three in North London.
Despite two future superstars of architecture combining
their talents, this job proved an inauspicious start to their careers.
I mean, it was hellish. I mean, we had extremely little experience,
even though we tried to sort of bring in people with a little bit more
experience, and we went from crisis to crisis to crisis.
Unlike the later work of Foster and Rogers, the houses were built
with traditional materials, such as brick,
and they struggled to find builders who could meet their ambitions.
One example of shoddy workmanship
was brought to the architects' attention by the house owner.
He pointed to what I thought was a damp-proof course, which is
usually a sort of rubber membrane of plastic,
stops the water going through the bricks,
and then he picked it up and he said, "What do you think this is?"
And it was the, it was the Daily Mail,
or whatever it was, painted black.
Well, I do remember, and I'm a rather sort of tough person,
sitting on, under a tree on Hampstead Heath
and literally crying, saying, "I'll never be an architect."
The problems caused by the slow and unreliable traditions
of the British building site
weren't just thwarting their architectural dreams.
Financially it was disastrous, and that's really what drove us
to look for another way.
I think Norman and I, and Wendy and Sue,
all decided we had to change,
and we had an opportunity to build a factory in Swindon
and it had to be done in a year at an immensely low price.
Searching for a cheaper and more reliable way of building,
the architects remembered some of the steel structures they'd seen
on their American road trips, for which components had been
manufactured under carefully controlled factory conditions.
It was wanting to use materials that were precise
and the whole thing went together a bit like clockwork.
It was all site welded, but beautifully done
and it took no time at all to build the frame.
Foster and Rogers' factory for Reliance Controls
has since been demolished, but back in 1967 it marked
the birth of what became known as high-tech architecture.
It was unlike anything else built in Britain at the time,
neither traditional brick nor the brutalist concrete
then in vogue with property developers and the public sector.
You could see the whole skeleton.
It was perfectly obvious how it all worked.
You know, really lightweight, but stiff structure.
Tony Hunt was a crucial collaborator for Rogers and Foster,
and later Grimshaw, Farrell and Hopkins.
All these architects built their success
on a different kind of relationship with engineers.
The customary way of designing is that the architect
is trained to design and then to bring in engineers
to translate that design and make it stand out.
I think that's a totally inadequate way of designing.
I want to know whilst I'm in the process of designing,
I want to know what the possibilities are.
To discuss at a meet, early meeting with the architect,
"How are we going do this?"
It's very difficult to define in the end...
exactly who designed precisely what in the building.
In the situation we're talking about here,
the engineer is part of a complete team of people.
Sitting around a round table which is non-hierarchical,
that was considered radical and revolutionary as a way of working.
The times were a-changing, how architects worked,
what they built with and who they built for were all being rethought.
Since the '20s, modernists had dreamed of the better world
they might construct.
In the '60s, that utopia got a makeover from the counterculture.
# Something happening here
# What it is ain't exactly clear... #
We were extremely moved by the political situation,
you know, CND marches, went on most of those, Vietnam,
and really the whole student, intellectual workers revolution
against the status quo tradition and so on.
We were very much involved in all those things.
# Stop, children, what's that sound?
# Everybody looks what's going down... #
I was responding to the times I lived in.
Flower power and... make love not war.
A general feeling of freedom in society...
is there a kind of architecture that reflects that?
Is there a kind of non-monumental kind of architecture?
Other switched-on young cats were asking the same questions,
and they defined the aims of architecture for their generation.
What's needed is a new architecture to stand beside the space capsules,
computers and throwaway packs of an atomic world.
Sometimes dubbed the Beatles of Buildings,
the collective of young designers who called themselves Archigram
treated architecture like pop art.
I suppose we wanted to be sort of interesting and famous
and do something weird, you know.
Change is the dominant fact of today.
Though hugely influential, Archigram never actually built anything -
that was for the squares.
Instead they published magazines and generally wound people up.
You know, I think if you don't rebel against the generation before you,
there's something wrong with you.
The city should be capable of forming and reforming
day by day, week by week, year by year,
as events and purposes change.
I was really fired up by the idea of
architecture that you can manipulate and you can change
and that's responsive to the users.
And that was the subject of my thesis.
Archigram's Peter Cook was one of Grimshaw's tutors.
To show the importance of change,
Nick illustrated his final student project with animation.
My subject was basically an interweaving network
of travelators and escalators, and so it was a constantly changing,
constantly rejuvenating organisation.
When Grimshaw left college in 1965,
he formed a practice with Terry Farrell.
Their first major new build project together applied the concept
of adaptable architecture to a pressing personal need.
We...none of us had anywhere to live.
I'd slept on the floor of the office for, for, for a while.
So Nick and Terry started their own housing cooperative
and designed a tower block for themselves to live in
on a site they'd found near Regent's Park.
It was dirt cheap.
We built it for the same price as a council block.
Farrell and Grimshaw's tower, however,
wouldn't look anything like a typical concrete council block.
I liked the idea of having an anonymous frame,
which you could then clad with modern materials.
There'd been very few buildings clad in aluminium up to that point.
But it was structurally strong, it didn't corrode
and it was waterproof, so it became a skin of a building.
The chief planning officer, you know, he was speechless.
I mean, he said, "You're...
"An aluminium building next to Regent's Park!"
"Over my dead body", he said.
It wasn't just the exterior which was radical.
The interior was built for the kind of constant change
Archigram had envisaged.
It was designed almost like an office block.
All the structure was on the outside wall or in the core,
so you could remove any of the internal walls,
so that gave you tremendous flexibility.
You could have 14 bed-sitters on one floor, or in fact one flat,
and everything possible in between.
Some people bought the flat next door later on
and knocked the two together, so the configuration of bedrooms
and kitchens could vary their position.
Grimshaw and I both took an apartment there
and we both lived there. We were all in and out of each other flats,
having dinner and what-have-you, and drinks parties.
It was a very good, a very good community actually,
a very good community feeling.
Cabbies quickly nicknamed it "The Sardine Can"
but within the profession,
the tower marked out Farrell and Grimshaw as architects on the rise.
By the time their partnership took off however,
another had fallen apart -
Foster and Rogers.
There was no work and if there's no work,
there's too much time to argue about things,
but also probably we were both as, er, strong as each other
and there was the beginning of a feeling of we needed our own space.
In 1970, Norman Foster found a new partner - Michael Hopkins.
And we got on very well together, you know.
We had, um, a great relationship.
Norman was clearly a sort of very energetic chap,
who would be giving the whole thing his heart and soul.
I was probably a bit more laid back.
They understand the building they're going to work in, you know,
and where they get their tea and where they park their car,
all these sort of things.
I mean, how do you see yourself...?
What the two shared was a determination to innovate,
which proved particularly appealing
to clients in new industries like high technology.
When a computer firm urgently needed more space for its expanding workforce,
Foster and Hopkins created a pioneering membrane structure,
which sat in the office car park.
When you fill it with air, it blows up like a balloon.
'We were able to realise space for some 70 people in a total period,
'including research, of, ooh, about eight weeks.
'But of that time, the erection time was 55 minutes.'
Never collapsed, but the odd puncture you could cope with.
You just get one of those... get a bit of Elastoplast
and stick it on the outside.
The practice would prove as radical in its social agenda
as in its approach to structure and materials.
Mirror glass was a swanky novelty in 1970.
Foster made a whole building from the stuff in London's Docklands,
many years before the bankers moved in.
Conditions were horrific and this was a total transformation.
I mean, the idea that the dockers could have a civilised place.
Foster's amenity centre for the Fred Olsen Shipping Company gave
blue collar staff a white collar quality of design.
And I brought together, under one roof, dockers and management.
For so many, it was unthinkable because...
I can remember the quotes at the time -
"They're dirty", "They swear",
"How could secretaries be in the same building as the dockers?"
Foster has always stuck to that, he's always seen offices
and factories as basically the same kind of thing,
they accommodate working people
and those working people are not divided by any class.
He's a working-class chap himself.
I think that, in a way, we're all products of a background,
I think we're influenced by our background.
I would see my father coming home as a manual worker and, um,
his workplace, it was a pretty horrible place.
Um, now, at Olsen, I engaged personally
and directly with the unions.
That's not what architects are supposed to do,
architects are supposed to design buildings, but buildings don't arise
out of thin air, they're generated by needs, the needs of people.
Foster's ex-partner had also moved on.
In 1970, Richard and Sue Rogers formed a new practice
with the man who would eventually build The Shard, Renzo Piano.
Renzo and I were both unemployed and we thought it'd be more fun
to be two unemployed than one unemployed, if you like.
We got on very well.
When I met him, it was love at first sight, you know.
I was totally iconoclast, you know, and Richard was,
we were young, mad people.
Bad boys in some ways.
Like so many of their generation,
both Richard and Renzo were fired up by the spirit of '68,
the year when protests in Europe, above all in Paris,
came close to full-scale revolution.
So when President Pompidou, a figure hated by the left,
announced an architectural competition,
Rogers refused on principle to even consider entering.
So I wrote a whole list of things which I didn't like -
I didn't like the idea of working for a President.
And he actually made a beautiful text
that was a perfect explication why we should not do it.
I was against it and he was pro it.
We had a very democratic discussion. I lost.
We said OK, so let's be free.
What can we do to break rules, to make...to make something different.
What Pompidou wanted was a new art gallery and library.
What Rogers and Piano designed was a fun palace,
where people would be free to do their own thing.
Alongside their architectural sketches,
they submitted their own manifesto.
The first paragraph says, "A place for all people, all ages,
"all creeds, for the poor and the rich, for the old and the young."
To transform a place that used to be quite dusty, quite closed,
to something completely accessible,
something that celebrates the openness.
Their design specified that all the walls and even the floors should be
moveable, to suit the changing desires of the building's users.
It was as flexible and fantastical
as anything Archigram had dreamed up
and, even the architects assumed,
no more likely to make it beyond the drawing board.
When we knew that there were
681 entries, then we were sure that we never win.
And one morning a call came.
It took me ten minutes to understand what the lady was talking about
and finally I got it.
I said "Oh, my God!"
So I called Richard and told, "Hey, Vecchio."
Vecchio, which is what he calls me, old man, um, I'm four years older,
and he said, "Sit down, we've won the competition."
I said "Stop pulling my leg."
Thanks God he sat down because it was...
it was completely unexpected.
And then the next day, we had to go to Paris.
We arrived there and everybody was in dinner jackets,
I mean, it was really glittery, only the way the French can do it,
you know, and here we were with the sort of, you know, fuck-off-type
T-shirts one wore in those days and people wearing shorts
and, you know, miniskirts and so on, um, but they were immensely kind.
The competition jury loved the concept.
They didn't realise that was all Rogers and Piano had at the time.
As the architects moved to Paris,
they didn't actually know what they were going to build.
There were people coming from all over the world there, you know,
and nobody knew really what they were doing.
Terrible problems with language.
We had Italians that didn't speak English,
English that didn't speak French.
To be honest, the competition design was unbuildable.
You know, sort of floundered around,
trying to find out what was happening.
We dug an absolutely colossal hole in the centre of Paris.
I do remember this sort of feeling of slight panic once,
looking down this massive hole, and it was huge,
and thinking, "Christ, what the hell are we going to put in this hole?"
And gradually, over the next weeks, it became apparent that we were
in a war because the French were absolutely hopping up and down
that foreigners, non-French, had won a competition for what was going
to be, although we didn't realise at the time, a national monument.
While Rogers battled to get his new-style art centre out of its hole,
his former partner was radically rethinking
a different type of building - the office.
This is Ipswich.
It's a pleasant, if rather ordinary town.
In 1975, it found itself with a most extraordinary building.
You may think it looks odd.
I think it may be the nearest thing to a masterpiece
that the modern movement has produced in Great Britain so far.
Norman Foster, with Michael Hopkins, created a building which,
in more ways than one, would prove the forerunner of the places
where many of us work today.
For starters, it's shiny.
If you look back at the people that changed the way that
architecture around us looks, there's not that many of them
and Norman Foster had a lot to do with persuading the architects
that followed him to use extensive glass all over their buildings.
Earlier generations of modern architects held
large panes of glass in place with concrete or steel supports.
At Willis Faber, there's nothing between the sheets
except a thin layer of neoprene rubber.
Rather than trying to support something from underneath,
it's much easier to hang it from the top.
I mean, glass is immensely strong when it's suspended
and the glass is truly suspended around the edge.
Foster perfected the art of framing huge sheets of glass
with next to nothing.
It was an extraordinary technical achievement.
It made buildings look wonderfully precise and elegant and ethereal.
Back in the '70s, even the nation's leading glass manufacturer
had been sceptical about whether
a curtain wall of the size Foster wanted was remotely feasible.
Pilkington's were nervous of it and they were worried about
whether they could do it.
4,000 square metres, after all, the largest glass wall in Europe,
this was taking technology a whole lot further
in terms of flexibility and the fact it would go round curves
and everything else, so it was an enormous leap forward.
Oh, it was very radical.
The great thing about Willis is they were an insurance business
and they were prepared to take a punt on this working out, you know.
As with Foster's work for the dockers,
this building was radical not only in terms of how it looked,
but also how it was designed to be used.
Employees were treated to a garden on the roof and -
the height of '70s luxury - a heated swimming pool.
The feature which proved most influential however was
the way the workers were arranged -
this was the first major office block in Britain
to be entirely open plan.
It seemed you could get a better solution by bringing people
together on one floor, without, um, fixed walls between them,
and to create areas with moveable elements of furniture.
It seemed a progressive idea at the time.
Tear down the walls and everyone could come together in harmony -
the workplace as one big commune...
with typewriters.
And the freedom promised by open plan wasn't just social,
it was structural.
Fewer walls meant greater flexibility.
It's a far better environment for today's changing functions.
An instant flexible office facility that can parallel
the surging turbulent business life it serves.
Large open spaces still needed to be organised somehow,
which is why American designers Herman Miller had pioneered
a system of modular office furniture.
Building their British headquarters was a dream commission
for any young architect obsessed with adaptability.
I think they interviewed six firms of architects for their UK factory
and Norman Foster was one of them.
I know because they came straight from his office to our office, so...
Your business is changing constantly.
Herman Miller believes your office should change with it.
They had a very good patter about flexibility
and about how human beings weren't meant to be in boxes
and we liked all this. We thought, together,
we could design a factory building which was totally flexible.
The particular innovation of this Farrell Grimshaw design was
to take the concept of adaptability
and apply it to the exterior of a building.
All the wall panels here, whether plastic or glass,
were interchangeable.
Where we wanted glass, we could put glazing up,
we could just have solid walls et cetera and we could change them.
It was an architecture which doesn't just sort of stand there
and you try and use it,
but architecture that you can manipulate and you can change.
"Hold on, Geoff" if you like democracy in the workplace,
that's what was emerging.
The goal of flexibility was challenging notions
of how buildings functioned and consequently what they look like.
In Paris, Rogers and Piano had finally figured out
how to build their adaptable, accessible art centre.
In the pursuit of architectural and political freedom,
they'd discarded their own early plans,
rejected architectural tradition and inverted structural convention.
The building itself is inside out.
In other words, what you usually see inside goes on the outside.
That means that inside is totally free of these elements
and so totally flexible.
These large spaces, the equivalent of two football fields,
without a single vertical interruption.
You've got the ultimate Meccano box here,
where you can change everything,
you can build a little cell there, you can build a big space there,
you can have a moving floor there.
The architects couldn't find a Meccano set
with 150-foot-long pieces, however,
so their kit of parts had to be custom-made.
These huge things were made in a casting factory.
It was a bit like Dante's Inferno.
You know, it's extraordinary to see
because you've got these huge vats of molten steel
and you can mould something to the exact requirements,
which is a big advantage.
Obviously, aesthetically, it's very pleasing
because you can get any shape you want.
Quality is controlled in the factory.
Everything arrives prefabricated, ready-finished.
This building was put up faster than any building in Europe.
The structure itself and the floors
all went up above ground in eight months,
just like a Meccano.
It wasn't just the structural engineering
which the architects had exposed to the public.
What you actually are seeing, which is new in this inside-out building,
is the mechanical services.
All those elements which are usually hidden behind a false ceiling
or a false wall.
From a functional point of view,
this also happens to be the part which you change most.
The pipes are colour-coded - green for water, blue for air,
as if they were merely elements of a diagram.
But filling an entire street of historic Paris
with supersized plumbing wasn't motivated purely by practicality.
The use of the machine language was really part of this rebellion,
to the fact that a cultural building should be like a tool
and not like a palace.
French critics had once dismissed Rogers and Piano as "hippies".
They were, in fact, more like punks,
sticking two fingers up at conventions
of what a building should look like
and also at the Parisian authorities.
I have to be honest, I certainly look at it and think,
"God, how did we get away with that?"
We just sort of didn't really bother about the planners and things.
There was never a drawing of it.
They were just pipes and nobody's interested in pipes, are they?
And I don't think anybody outside the office was quite aware
of what was happening until it happened.
We went through all the adventure of Pompidou
pretending we didn't talk French.
"Je ne comprends pas."
"I don't understand" was our system.
I think, just watching back, we were impossible people.
Through their bloody-mindedness,
the team had got their design built more or less as they'd wanted,
but at first there was little to suggest
that anyone else would like it.
We didn't have a single piece of positive media for six years.
There were all sort of comments in the paper, like,
"When are they going to take the scaffolding down?",
and all this sort of thing.
The fortunes of the project were transformed, however, by the public.
In its first year of opening, it attracted more visitors
than the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre -
over six million people.
It was immediately taken over by the young.
Within days of opening, it was full to the doors with young people.
Out of 681 entries to Pompidou's competition,
only Rogers and Piano had suggested
creating a public piazza on the site.
It became a meeting point for the whole of Paris.
The Pompidou Centre set the template for the modern arts landmark -
accessible, fun and iconic -
and some of its earliest visitors
have grown up to be architects themselves.
I used to go to Paris while the Centre Pompidou was being built.
It was a very important experience,
just to see such an extraordinary building.
It's certainly the most radical building
of the post-war years, I think.
There aren't many buildings
that actually change things for ever,
that they change the way we look at the world.
Centre Pompidou spawned a new generation of architects
who unashamedly celebrated the art of engineering
in a way that was very explicit.
Pompidou, created against all odds, felt at first like a one-off.
Yet, less than a year later,
Norman Foster unveiled an art gallery
which sounded remarkably similar.
Aiming for a number of things -
to produce a building that didn't monumentalise art,
a building that would be open in its approach,
that would bring activities together.
The interior itself is completely uncluttered, so that you can
adjust lights within it and you can move panels around and so on.
Flexibility - the building can change.
Parts of it are open so you can get views out and natural light in.
The aims of Foster and Rogers were almost identical.
The resulting buildings, however, looked very different.
Rogers' structure felt like a fantastical machine.
Foster's architecture was rational and minimal,
less of a spaceship, more of an aircraft hanger.
There are obviously common denominators between us,
a sense of shared values.
But if you look at the directions in which we've evolved,
I think that you'll find that we've gone in different directions
and I think, you know, that's something to celebrate.
While Foster was designing his temple
for Sir Robert and Lisa Sainsbury's art collection,
another of his collaborators decided to go solo.
Norman came up with the idea of this bloody great aircraft hangar.
I remember feeling that that was going off in the wrong direction
for that particular thing.
And I was sort of half thinking of going on my own
and, anyway, Norman went on and built the Sainsbury Centre
and far from being the wrong thing,
it was always the best thing in Robert Sainsbury's collection.
You know, he really loved it.
So I was quite wrong.
Michael Hopkins immediately set up a new practice,
with an architect he already knew well -
Mrs Hopkins.
You came home to join me, really, didn't you?
Their first project was to build themselves a family home,
which took a strikingly different form from its Hampstead neighbours.
There would be no question at that moment in time...
..it was going to be a steel and glass box.
It was an aesthetic that we really enjoyed,
the structure expressed on the inside.
In the way that we knew we liked things to look.
Having built one of Britain's first open-plan office blocks,
Michael Hopkins now chose to live in a very open-plan home.
Initially, we didn't have any blinds around the perimeter.
It became clear very quickly that we needed some blinds,
so we got the perimeter blinds
and then we went on to use blinds as the subdivision internally.
They're raised and lowered to adapt the space.
Le Corbusier had aspired to a house which was "a machine for living in".
50 years on, here was a home built like a factory,
from industrial materials.
Hello.
Photographs appeared in books and magazines across the world.
We've lived... How long have we lived here now?
Um... 30-odd years.
Mmm, 35 years now.
It's exactly the same as it's always been. It's always been...
It's just us, really.
Haven't changed my mind about it one little jot in, er...
No.
I mean, I'd like...
I'd like the thing a bit bigger, bigger scale.
The Hopkins house was a textbook example of what, by the late '70s,
was seen as a distinctive movement in architecture.
Hopkins, Foster, Rogers, Grimshaw and Farrell
were praised by critics for bringing modernism into the space age,
and their collective achievements now had a name -
high-tech.
But it hadn't come from the architects.
I've always rather objected to the word "high-tech".
It sort of implies some kind of fashion label or something.
High-tech, for God's sake, was going to the moon,
you know, I mean...
It doesn't really have anything much to do with real high technology,
digital technology,
but then Gothic has nothing to do with Goths either.
Stylistic labels have a life of their own.
The writers who popularised the term "high-tech" had picked up
on something the architects rarely discussed.
Technology in their work wasn't only a means
of delivering more efficient buildings -
it was also their defining aesthetic.
This century is very much the century of science
and we find that the analysis of science
helps us with the poetry of architecture.
High-tech meant more than the rational application of engineering.
It was the celebration,
perhaps even fetishisation, of the imagery of technology.
Unfortunately, those were the qualities one of its inventors
began to distrust.
It wasn't just a way of building, it was a style.
There were ideological fixers that everything had to be lightweight,
everything had to be synthetic and factory-made.
Farrell's doubts about high-tech were fuelled by plans
for the historic London district of Covent Garden.
The fruit and veg market moved out to this big shed,
quite techy kind of building, very efficient and so on,
so there was a whole district of empty and semi-derelict buildings.
So the proposal, if you continued the past 20 years,
was to knock it all down, start again.
In fact, the student, Nicholas Grimshaw,
had designed a new scheme
for the whole Covent Garden site in the '60s.
There was no idea of conservation then.
As far as we were concerned,
they were crummy, crumbling Victorian buildings
and we students were absolutely thrilled -
this was a real chance for something new.
But by the '70s, the public was beginning to question
whether new always meant better.
For the first time, opposition was growing, protest movements began
and I joined in the groups and I did several projects there.
I was able to argue for the retention of all the buildings
and I made a new courtyard
and we did almost, as it were, a demonstration scheme.
Farrell's new-found interest in conservation
set him on a collision course with his partner.
I got the most terrific excitement
and thrill out of working with the newer materials
and the possibilities for the future
and I didn't sense, really in any way,
that Farrell was interested in that.
Grimshaw saw it much more clearly than I did at the time
that it couldn't continue with two architects that were drifting apart,
as they say in marriages.
You know, Fosters and Rogers,
they were never longer than two or three years.
Ours was 15 years, and so when it went,
I felt a deep sense of loss and I felt this was like a death.
Farrell and Grimshaw split in 1980.
Their differences proved prophetic
for the difficult decade which architecture was about to enter.
MUSIC: "Are 'Friends' Electric?" by Tubeway Army
Heritage and high-tech would be pitted against each other
and the '60s radicals would have to adapt to a more conservative era.
In the next episode, high-tech defends itself against rival styles,
the press and even the heir to the throne.
The new mission for the architecture of the future
was to get along better with the past.
You can learn more about iconic British designs
and the people behind them
with The Open University's interactive Building Stories.
Go to...
..and follow the links to The Open University.