Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Rogers

Spoken like an architect who’s tired of being asked to solve political problems with pretty renderings. Richard Rogers’ line is disarmingly plain, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point: it drags architecture out of the realm of taste and into the realm of rules. “There has to be” is a small phrase with a big shove behind it. He’s not proposing a fashionable preference for bamboo over concrete; he’s insisting that material choice is a public question that requires governance.

The subtext is a rebuke to the industry’s favorite alibi: that designers merely respond to clients, budgets, and codes. Rogers flips that. Codes and standards aren’t neutral constraints; they’re levers for cultural change. “About what materials we use and so on” sounds casual, but it gestures to the whole supply chain - extraction, embodied carbon, labor conditions, toxicity, waste. The “and so on” is doing heavy work, implying a backlog of unglamorous consequences that the profession too often treats as someone else’s problem.

Context matters. Rogers came out of a high-tech tradition that celebrated exposed structure and industrial components, then lived long enough to watch those same systems collide with climate reality. By the late 20th and early 21st century, material choices became a frontline issue: concrete’s emissions, steel’s energy intensity, the politics of insulation, the lifecycle accounting behind “green” claims. Rogers’ intent here is pragmatic and moral at once: if architecture wants to keep claiming it shapes society, it has to accept the boring power of policy as part of design.