Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Rogers

Rogers is pushing back against the lazy romance of novelty. In a culture that treats redesign as a kind of visual caffeine shot, “mix it up” is his dismissive label for change performed as branding rather than as craft. The hook is “high quality materials”: not a nostalgic plea for marble-and-brass permanence, but a demand that buildings admit what they are made of and what they cost in labor, money, and planet. If you start with good stuff, he implies, you inherit an obligation: upgrades should be legible, repairable, and even pleasurable - not disguised as a total reinvention.

The subtext is classic Rogers-era high-tech ethics. His architecture loved exposed structure and services because honesty was a social stance: show the guts so the public can understand the system, and the system can be maintained. “A way of changing them” reads like an argument for modularity and reversibility, but also for dignity in maintenance. A city that can “celebrate” alteration doesn’t treat upkeep as failure; it treats it as civic life, like scaffolding as a festival rather than a scarlet letter.

Context matters: Rogers built in the shadow of postwar rebuilding and later the boom-and-bust cycle of developer churn. He watched perfectly usable fabric demolished for trend. This line is a quiet manifesto against throwaway urbanism: change, yes - but change with manners, with memory, and with an aesthetic that lets people see continuity instead of erasure.