Although his name has always been above the door of the partnership, Rogers himself had little to do with the office’s increasingly corporate work of the last decade or so. His early buildings remain by far the most compelling – perhaps none more so than his first major project.
It had a bumpy ride: the screens were dropped, the floors didn’t move and fire regulations curtailed some of the more daring ideas. Pressure groups filed lawsuits against the project, while a Guardian art critic said. But the architects were vindicated by the public reaction: around seven million people visited in the first year, more than the Louvre and Eiffel Tower combined.
, completed in 1986. With floors clustered around a 60-metre high atrium, lit by a barrel-vaulted glass roof, its most radical move was to place the service cores outside the building in a series of towers. This freed up more floor space for desks, and let Rogers revel in the dynamic interplay of staircases, glass lifts and toilet pods on the facade, in a polished frenzy of stainless steel.