Blueprint for a better society Richard Rogers nearly gave up architecture. Or rather it nearly gave up on him. At the start of his career, after completing the inside-out Pompidou Centre in 1977 with its exposed piping and framework, he received savage criticism and struggled to win contracts. I thought I was a roaring failure. Having no work is like having no sex - it's not a good thing," he says. A wry smile spreads across his face, which with his beady eyes, Roman nose and clipped, curly grey hair gives the 78-year-old the appearance of a smiley Julius Caesar. The fallow period really only came to an end after the completion in 1986 of the bold modernist Lloyd's of London building. It catapulted him to the status of starchitect. But the neologism makes Lord Rogers shudder. "I don't like "starchitects." It's a funny word. I don't like "star" anything. In the end we are all people. Lord Rogers of Riverside might detest the label but the chairman of Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, the firm he started in 1977, cannot deny being one of a handful of architects with a celebrity status - in Lord Rogers" case partly due to skirmishes with Prince Charles over architecture, most recently over the latter's intervention on the Chelsea Barracks which saw the master builder lose the project. He is a Labour peer who appears in newspaper diary pages with his wife, Ruth (better known as "Ruthie") Rogers, the chef and co-founder of The River Café, a west London hotspot for A-listers that started life as the canteen for his practice, which sits next door. Winner of the Pritzker prize, architecture's most prestigious award, and twice awarded the Riba Stirling prize, he is behind landmark buildings including the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Madrid's Barajas airport and Channel 4"s London headquarters. The reason he finds the term starchitect so repellent, he explains, is that to give architects rock-star status is to absolve them of any social obligation. We have a debt to society which has to be recognised. Capitalism "with a human, ethical face" is the topic he wants to discuss - finally conceding to an interview after 18 months of nagging. His sudden enthusiasm to talk is partly because he wants to highlight what he sees as the social fallout of the coalition government's fiscal policy. Curiously, he has invited Andrew Morris, the practice's commercial director, to sit in on our conversation to fill in the business blanks. At times it appears that Mr Morris is acting as a minder. "The gap between the top 5 per cent and the bottom 5 per cent is getting bigger and bigger," Lord Rogers says, a rehearsed fluidity taking over his occasional bouts of mumbling (he appears in turn both spry and elderly). His anger over social inequality did not, however, stop him designing the Knightsbridge complex One Hyde Park, which contains the famously expensive £140m penthouse. Nonetheless, he feels uneasy about what he calls "the extremism of business," which emphasises profits at the expense of social responsibility. "The problem [is] that there is absolutely no ethics or morality within the society we live in [which is skewed towards] big businesses," he says. He is also talking today because he wants to suggest an alternative model - his own. His practice has a constitution enshrining its belief that it is "responsible for contributing to the welfare of mankind, of the society in which we practise, and the team with whom we work" and sets out its aim "to produce work which is beneficial to society." The manifesto is meant to prod architects to weigh up the ethics of potential projects. There is also a profit-share scheme, in which directors" allocations are limited to eight times the salary of the firm's lowest-paid architect. Lord Rogers wants to lead by example, to show other businessmen that you can achieve a balance between profits and ethics. We haven't suffered. We don't have helicopters or planes but we live well. I have a very nice house. In fact he has two Georgian houses in Chelsea knocked together. The commercial pay-off of being a nice business is a cohesive firm: "We don't have major break-ups." When the financial crisis struck in 2008, he was forced to make 30 people redundant, including many senior architects. "None of us knew if it was the end of the world," he says. Some of those people were 60 [years old] and being 60 in a downturn you ain't going to find a job easily. We were old friends so it was the most horrible thing we've ever done. In 2010, the last recorded financial year, post-tax profits were £306,000, less than half the previous year's, on revenues of £18m. The practice, he says, is restoring its strength by refocusing on new markets including India and Australia. Subsequently, a handful of redundant employees have returned. These green shoots, however, mean he is concerned with an issue that periodically exercises him: whether his company is too big. Unlike Lord Foster, his old friend, former partner (in Team 4, the firm the two started with their ex-wives) and competitor, he harbours no ambitions for an industrial-scale company. Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners employs 180 people, Foster and Partners about 1,000. He prefers the familial feel of a small business. What motivates him, he insists, is not expansion but a yearning for a "better job than the last one." He professes to be happy to be mentioned in the same breath as Lord Foster, whom he met when they were both studying at Yale, but he could not have flourished if they continued to work together. People like Norman [cast] a shadow, you need to get out of it. You need your own air. At this point, Ruthie, wearing her chef whites, saunters in holding a copy of the Times Literary Supplement. She wants to show her husband a poem by Craig Raine about their son Bo who died unexpectedly last year at the age of 27. Lord Rogers later reflects on parental anguish: "Some people [take refuge] under the sheets. We didn't. Ultimately, he says, grief is a profoundly personal experience. You make your own way forward. He was helped by the family (he has four other sons) rallying round. You open the doors and everybody comes in. Solitude is something he dislikes and he seldom spends time alone. Dyslexia, he says, made him gregarious but also spurred him to prove himself, helped by the fact that his parents "never gave up on me." Born in Florence to upper-middle class, Anglo-Italian parents (his father was a doctor, his mother, a potter) they left Fascist Italy in 1938. Later he returned to Italy while on national service and met his father's cousin Ernesto Rogers, one of the country's prominent architects, who helped Lord Rogers decide on his own career. Despite his age, he refuses to give up work. Why would you retire from something you enjoy? He is, however, slowing down - by this, he means no longer working through the night - and is "realising that maybe I won't be here in another 20 years." Succession is why five years ago the Richard Rogers Partnership became Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners - an attempt to deflect the focus from its founder. But can the firm survive without him? I'm very keen that it should and I think it will. While the second half of his life "is much better than the first" he refuses to say he is completely at ease with himself. Comfortable is a difficult word. I am mildly comfortable. I fit in my skin.