They will know of his longstanding commitment to promoting the public realm and more recent focus on environmental issues and planning sustainable cities. What this book does is to provide a context to view what at times may appear as contradictory tendencies within the thought and work of the architect and his practice. Rogers' concerns are certainly very wide-ranging in their scope. They are presented here as aspects of an attempt at a unified vision of architecture and urbanism. Powell describes Rogers as a humanist in the true Renaissance sense.
Civility implies living in harmony with the past, the present and the future.
This image of social, technological and environmental harmony seems strangely out of sync with these stormy, postmodern times. In many ways, Rogers remains a modernist of the old school - if from its more exuberant wing. The architecture remains primarily a celebration of technology. Rogers disclaims the high tech label. His collaborator on Beaubourg, Renzo Piano has portrayed the building as more crafted than engineered.