June 21 (Bloomberg) -- British architect Richard Rogers is working on a plan to bury part of the highway along New York's East River and create a waterfront from the lower East Side to the southern tip of Manhattan.
Rogers, 70, is known for futuristic-looking buildings such as London's Millennium Dome and Paris's Centre Pompidou, where the utility pipes ride up the outside of the museum. He also designs office towers for companies including British Land Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG. Rogers has a parallel career advising mayors how to revive declining inner-city areas and stop people from moving to the suburbs by offering them apartments, restaurants, green squares and riverfronts.

The architect on May 11 won New York City's competition to design a master plan for the East River waterfront together with Sharples, Holden & Pasquarelli Architects. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, aims to revitalize lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center's destruction.

Rogers, silver-haired and lean in belted trousers and a white shirt, works out of a converted oil refinery on the River Thames in west London's Hammersmith area. The glass-fronted studio has white metal supporting beams and columns, a canteen with pink and orange chairs and an exhibition space where people wander in from the river to see models and photographs of his buildings.

Richard Rogers Partnership, including 75 architects who give 20 percent of the firm's profit to charities, averaged annual revenue of 14.7 million pounds ($27 million) in the past three years. The top salary is six times the pay of an employee of two years' standing.

Lloyd's Headquarters

The displays range from the headquarters of Lloyd's of London's insurance market and DaimlerChrysler's building in Berlin to Rogers's planned Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow Airport and an airport project at Madrid Barajas, Europe's biggest construction site.

Rogers's wife Ruth is the chef of the adjacent River Cafe and co-author of the River Cafe Cook Book. Her restaurant opens onto a garden on the river beside a car park where oil vats once stood. The Rogers live in two stucco 19th century row houses overlooking Chelsea Hospital that were gutted to create a two-story high space inside.

Born in Florence, Italy, Rogers, the son of a doctor and a potter, was raised in London with Bauhaus furniture that he said accustomed him to modern-looking shapes. Rogers followed his uncle, an Italian architect, by entering the profession in 1962 after studying at Yale University. A partnership with Italy's Renzo Piano, who helped Rogers to win a competition to design the Centre Pompidou in 1971, dissolved in 1977.

Two of Rogers's designs in the 1980s, for offices under St. Paul's Cathedral and a new wing for London's National Gallery, were derailed by Prince Charles, who campaigned successfully for copies of older buildings.

Rusting in Paris

Some of Rogers's structures may be costly to maintain. The Centre Pompidou needed two years of renovations in 1997, after 150 million visitors and 20 years of exposure to Parisian weather. The silver-piped Lloyd's building gathers dirt and its six exterior staircases may leave it exposed to security risks. The nearby Baltic Exchange was bombed by the Irish Republican Army in 1993.

"There's no way to terrorist-proof a building,'' said Robert Torday, a spokesman for Rogers.

In Queens, a New York borough, Rogers is designing 2 million square feet of offices, studios, housing and stores for Silvercup Studios, where Home Box Office Inc.'s "Sex and the City'' television series was filmed. Rogers, who was knighted in 1991 and made a peer in the House of Lords in 1996, is an honorary trustee of New York's Museum of Modern Art, where he will show a planned skyscraper for London's financial district at an exhibition of tall buildings next month. He talked to Bloomberg Muse's Linda Sandler in his studio among the models of his buildings.

Manhattan Plan

Bloomberg: You're doing a waterfront plan in Manhattan and a master plan for a new city district in a Lisbon dockyard. What's the key to making developments like that work?

Rogers: In some ways, cities have had the same needs since Mesopotamia. You want to see your neighbor and you want to go to work and come home and sit on the stoop. You want to have security for yourself and your family, and you want ease of communication. It's very much the same today. We love our kids and we make love in the same way. We like to eat well in places we like.

If you can give these things to people, they'll come back to the city.

Bloomberg: What's involved in your Manhattan plan?

Rogers: The area around the East River is run down. There's a high-level highway along it. On the East River Drive, the buildings look away from the river. They should be facing the river. They should have parks and cafes.

We're learning that motorways don't solve transportation problems, they just bring more cars. On the East River we may bring part of the highway underground around the United Nations Building, or we may bury some of it.

Barcelona Model

We can learn lessons from other cities. Los Angeles has lots of highways and it has the worst congestion. In Copenhagen, people go by bus. Barcelona -- I'm chief adviser to Mayor Joan Clos on urban planning -- had the problem of being a dying port. Now it's got industry, it's got parks along the sea. That's a story we're all trying to replicate.

In London, the success story is the South Bank. Fifteen or 20 years ago, no one would go to the South Bank. Today, you can walk from the Docklands practically to Kew Gardens. It's all accessible, and there are lots of cultural buildings. There's Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the Design Museum, the National Film Theatre. There are cafes and restaurants.

New York should recognize it's an island and use the water.

Bloomberg: You had your own plans for the South Bank.

Rogers: They didn't go anywhere. Our design was a great glass wave enveloping the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Hayward Gallery and the Purcell Room. It would have hidden the existing concrete structures and created a lot of new public spaces. We won the competition but the funding proved to be unavailable.

London Tower

Bloomberg: What about the tapering skyscraper you've designed for British Land at Leadenhall Street? What effect were you trying to create, and how will a 48-story tower fit in with the 600 historic buildings in the City?

Rogers: When you're designing a tall building in London there are severe constraints. This one leans back to avoid blocking the view of St. Paul's Cathedral from Fleet Street. That's why it's tapered. After that, the design was about legibility. You can read the structure through the glass, you can see how the building was put together. The northern facade contains the stairs, the lifts and servicing.

The design was also about limiting energy use and pollution. It has triple glazing with blinds inside to minimize the use of electric light and air conditioning. It uses chilled water, not air conditioning for cooling.

Fighting for Modernity

When you're putting an office building among historic buildings it has to be in sympathy in quality and mass. But a new building doesn't have to fit in. Every historic building was new at one time. The Strozzi Palace in the 16th century was considered an outrage. It was five stories. It dwarfed its older neighbors. Modernity has always been a battle.

There always has been a juxtaposition of styles. Renaissance architecture is very different from medieval yet we love seeing them together. You can have harmony through juxtaposition, not just by copying older styles.

Paternoster Square (a cluster of offices under St. Paul's that houses the London Stock Exchange and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.) is a continuous sore. The buildings copy older styles and they were not successful.

Bloomberg: What was your plan for Paternoster Square?

Rogers: I had a plan for genuinely modern buildings. They weren't a pastiche. But the mood of the country at the time, led by Prince Charles, was historicism. Prince Charles described modern architecture as a carbuncle.

The Victorians

It was the Victorians who started copying older styles. They wanted gothic or medieval or classical. The great buildings of the Victorian age were engineering works, stations, and the Crystal Palace. They were genuinely modern. The British Museum is less interesting. It's a nice building, but it's a copy.

Bloomberg: The City may be getting as many as five skyscrapers. How will they change people's lives? Because tall buildings attract a lot of people.

Rogers: The problem we're facing is the vitality of cities -- bringing people back to the center. The City had begun to lose corporations to Canary Wharf. It was competing with Paris and with Frankfurt. It turned toward conserving older buildings and the net result was corporations moved to the Docklands (including Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and HSBC Holdings Plc).

Then the City fell in love with good-quality design. Norman Foster and Kohn Pedersen Fox are building elegant towers. That's the way to bring people back to the center.

There are two outstanding things about the building we designed for Leadenhall Street. It has a seven-story atrium and a piazza as big as the Lutyens building that you can see beyond it. (He points to a tower projecting from a model of buildings on the street.)

Leadenhall Piazza

The piazza will increase the number of public cafes and restaurants, it will bring people into the center where there's good, or relatively good, public transport. It would be the only large public space in the Square Mile. Because it's a glazed space, protected from the weather, there are opportunities to host concerts, lectures, readings, screenings.

Ninety percent of the workers at Leadenhall Street will use public transport because there's no parking and few parking meters. Congestion charging limits the traffic, gives us money for buses. If you're looking for a city where you can encourage walking and bikes, you need a well-designed working city that's compact, with high density.

Bloomberg: What's it like working for British Land?

Rogers: I have an old standing relationship with John Ritblat (chairman of the U.K.'s second-largest real estate developer), but this is our first project for him. He has strong views. You need a good partner when you're designing a building. It's like a game of ping pong.

Partners

We've designed buildings for Elliott Bernerd of Chelsfield Plc at Paddington (a west London development near the station). He was chairman of the South Bank Centre. And for Stuart Lipton of Stanhope Plc we're doing Chiswick Park, (a west London office project that has won four architectural awards). Lipton was head of CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, a government-appointed body whose role is to improve buildings and open spaces).

Bloomberg: What work are you doing for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, as his adviser of planning?

Rogers: We're working on a plan to improve the streets in London -- to make pavements where people can walk, and green squares.

We're starting a refurbishment of 100 of London's green squares. One of the success stories has been the pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square.

We're doing a lot of plans for the Thames Gateway (an area of east London from Tower Bridge to Dartford). London will have grown by 23 percent between 1986 and 2016. Livingstone says the growth must all be in the 33 boroughs, there must be no sprawl.

London is going through its greatest vitality ever. It's much better than the 1960s. Then it was inward-looking.

Steel and Glass

Bloomberg: What are your favorite buildings and why do you like them?

Rogers: The Pompidou Center is one of my favorites. 1971 was a different era. Piano and I were the first foreign architects to have our own firms in France since the war. Now it's common. We had a tremendous client in Robert Bordaz, the first president of the center. He was in charge of the French withdrawal from Vietnam, and he made this building possible. It took six years to completion. The client relationship is very important.

It's hard to say which are your favorite buildings. It's like saying, which is your favorite child. But I do like the house I built for my parents in Wimbledon opposite the common. It's steel and glass with a lot of plants and natural light. My mother was a potter and she loved it.