Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Rogers

Rogers is doing something architects rarely admit to in public: shrinking the myth of the lone auteur and recasting the profession as connective tissue. The clunky phrase "did a pretty good role" reads like an instinctive refusal of grandiosity. He is staking credit, but carefully, almost sheepishly, locating his agency in verbs that sound more civic than heroic: "linking", "being a sounding board", "driving force". It is the rhetoric of facilitation - architecture as coordination, persuasion, and momentum rather than pure form-making.

The subtext is a defense of process. Rogers came up through postwar British modernism and later became synonymous with high-tech spectacle, yet he consistently argued for cities as democratic machines: legible, porous, usable. "Especially from the bottom up" signals the political stakes behind that posture. He is aligning himself with consultation culture, with neighborhoods, users, and the messy reality that planning is always negotiation. At the same time, he refuses the fashionable fantasy that grassroots energy alone can remake a city. "Bottom up as well as top down" is a pragmatic handshake between activists and institutions: you need legitimacy, funding, codes, and the power to implement.

Contextually, it echoes Rogers' public roles - advisory commissions, regeneration debates, the long fight to make design a policy issue rather than an aesthetic afterthought. The intent is to claim influence without sounding authoritarian: an architect as mediator between public desire and bureaucratic machinery, pushing from below while nudging the levers above.