If you are flying into Heathrow and have a window seat on the right of the plane, you should get an aerial view of two of Richard Rogers’ landmark projects even before you alight at Terminal 5 – BA’s exclusive new terminal – and his practice’s most recent achievement, which opens finally this month, 19 years after he won the competition to design it. First the Dome, now the O2 arena, which was built to celebrate the millennium and is the largest domed structure in the world, a gigantic white tent 365m in diameter supported by 100m-high yellow support masts.
Then, though you’ll need to look harder for it, you’ll be able to spot the Lloyd’s Building (1986) in the heart of the City, next to which construction will soon start on another Rogers project that promises to define the London skyline, a soaring tapering tower, 50 storeys tall, like a giant spire leaning away from St Paul’s, called the Leadenhall Building.
With its smooth glass-and-steel façades, it will stand in sharp contrast to the ‘bowellism’ of Lloyd’s, the term coined to describe early Rogers designs where the services are exposed. It was a style he pioneered with Renzo Piano, with whom he collaborated on the Pompidou Centre in Paris in the 70s, but still an arrestingly contemporary structure, with its external escalators, ducts and brightly colour-coded plumbing.
Rogers’ practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP), calls Terminal 5 ‘as significant a work in its oeuvre as the Pompidou and Lloyd’s’, and not just because it has taken the best part of two decades, involved 20,000 workers, cost £4.3 billion and been subject to ‘the longest public enquiry in British history’.
Though at first sight the great white steel and glass structure, with its gracefully undulating roof may appear less obviously innovative than those buildings seemed when they were first unveiled, it is outstanding on many levels. First, there is its scale: it is 40m high, 176m wide and 396m long, so vast that as Mike Davies, its project director and one of the few architects to have worked on the project since its inception, points out, the baggage-retrieval hall alone could accommodate three Empire State Buildings on their sides. Or to two Pompidou Centres.
Then there is its transparency. This is a terminal filled with natural light, which pours through the soaring curved ceiling and exterior walls. Even the air bridges that link the terminal to the planes are partially glazed. But, as Rogers says, it isn’t simply about clarity and admitting light: ‘The building is very much outward-looking as well. It’s not a box that you enter through a door. Here you are looking as much as possible at the planes, at the sky, towards London… It’s about vistas.’ On a clear day, you should be able to see as far as Windsor Castle, the Wembley arch and the towers of the City of London. More unusually, still, this is an airport terminal with a piazza between the terminal and its car park, planted with mature trees, so that passengers can sit outside. Again Rogers points to the Pompidou Centre, ‘where more than half the site was allocated to a public piazza’ and the ‘positive impact on urban regeneration’ it had as a result.
But ultimately, he says, Terminal 5 is ‘a celebration of technology, engineering and the activity of life. It’s about the return to celebrating great public spaces and the excitement of travel. We always point to the great Victorian railway stations as embodying the spirit of travel. Airports have tended to be more functionally and materialistically driven, driven by commercial elements as much to do with shopping as with flying. What we wanted to do was to capture the functional elements – check in, retail, baggage collection, customs, parking and so on – but also to create something that transcends their ordinariness in one uplifting space.’
