Aging & Wisdom Quote by Richard Rogers

In Richard Rogers' mouth, "completely Virtual Centre" is less a futurist flex than a grudging concession: yes, architecture can be dematerialized into screens, networks, and remote access. But the sentence turns on the hinge word "though". Rogers, a designer who made a career out of celebrating systems - ducts, circulation, public flow - draws a line where tech optimism meets human friction. The "general feeling" is doing quiet work here. It's not a quantified argument; it's an architect's instincts about how bodies, rooms, and chance encounters actually generate civic life.

The aside "maybe because I am getting very old" is disarming self-deprecation, but also a strategic inoculation against the charge of Luddism. He frames his resistance as temperament, not doctrine, while still staking a claim: the built environment is not just a service you can stream. "You still need face to face" reads like a small plea for the messy social chemistry that virtual spaces imitate but rarely reproduce - the overheard conversation, the glance that becomes a meeting, the way publics form when people share air and time.

Contextually, it lands in the long arc of late-20th-century high-tech architecture grappling with early-21st-century digital culture. Rogers' work often treated buildings as urban infrastructure for democracy; this line suggests that even if the "centre" migrates online, the civic promise of architecture depends on co-presence. Virtual can host content. Face-to-face still manufactures community.