Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Rogers

Rogers doesn’t dress it up: “fragmenting” is the polite technical diagnosis, “absolutely hideous” is the human verdict. The line works because it collapses the usual distance between architect-speak and street-level disgust. Fragmentation is what planners call it when cities stop feeling like cities - when highways shear neighborhoods, when privatized “public” spaces turn into lobbies with security guards, when development arrives as isolated objects rather than a shared fabric. By pairing that systemic critique with an almost blunt-force aesthetic judgment, Rogers signals that ugliness isn’t just taste; it’s evidence of broken civic life.

The repetition of “the environment” matters. He’s not talking about nature in the climate sense, but the built environment: the daily stage where power, money, and policy become concrete, glass, and dead zones. “In many places” is a pointed hedge, too. It implies he’s not condemning modernity outright; he’s condemning the way modernity gets value-engineered, deregulated, and carved up into disconnected parcels.

Contextually, this sits neatly inside Rogers’s lifelong argument for cities as democratic machines. As a high-tech modernist associated with the Pompidou Centre and Lloyd’s of London, he was often stereotyped as the guy who makes bold objects. This quote pushes back: iconic buildings aren’t enough if the connective tissue - streets, housing, transit, public space - is being shredded. The real target is a culture that treats the city as a portfolio, not a commons, and then acts surprised when the result looks like it was assembled by accident.