Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Rogers

Rogers is needling a familiar kind of futurism: the sort that sounds inevitable until you remember it was mostly a mood board. In the 1960s, “IT” (as both information technology and an aura of modernity) arrived with “tremendous theories” about liberation from the city. The fantasy was pastoral: professionals decamping to cottages, work dissolving into “virtual” life long before the internet could plausibly support it. Rogers’s choice of “supposedly” is doing the heavy lifting, puncturing the era’s techno-utopian confidence and exposing the class-coded idyll underneath it. Not everyone has a cottage; not every job can evaporate into a terminal.

As an architect, Rogers’s subtext is also territorial. He spent a career arguing that cities are not a temporary inconvenience waiting to be solved by gadgets, but the central stage for modern life: dense, social, messy, infrastructural. The quote reads like a warning against treating technology as an excuse to abandon civic investment. When the “virtual” is framed as an escape hatch, the physical city gets starved of imagination and funding, and inequality gets redesigned as lifestyle choice.

The context, heard from our post-remote-work vantage point, is quietly devastating: the 1960s prediction wasn’t wrong so much as miscast. Remote work did arrive, unevenly, decades later. What didn’t arrive was the egalitarian countryside dream. Rogers is reminding us that technology’s future is rarely where the brochures said it would be; it lands where power, property, and planning allow it to.