Irritable bowelism

摘要

Because there was a big retrospective of Eogers' architecture at the Design Museum as recently as 2010, the Royal Academy exhibition presents each scheme rather fleetingly, often frustratingly so. Instead it focuses on the ideas and ethos that inform Rogers' life and work generally. The title, Inside Out, refers to his predilection for exposing the structural skeleton, servicing entrails and vertical circulation outside the main body of the building. This distinctive trait starts with the Centre Pompidou that launched Rogers and Renzo Piano to international fame. Although Piano remains proud of this architectural landmark, he refers to it as 'a young man's building, an act of loutish bravado'. Recognising the validity of Postmodernity's criticisms, though not its architecture, he then entered a highly exploratory phase in partnership with Peter Rice before evolving the more mature, contextually and culturally inflected approach first exemplified by the Menil Collection. By contrast, as this exhibition makes clear, Rogers has not moved on much.