Smash hit

Back in 2001, the new London Assembly was worried about Rogers’s appointment “without proper scrutiny” as consultant to the Greater London Authority: a role which involved persuading Ken Livingstone, the mayor, to encourage more towers. The assembly got nowhere with its objections.

The Conservatives, in their turn, were charmed by this perpetually bronzed and relaxed figure in his designer coloured shirts, for they gave him the Millennium Dome to design — a project continued by the incoming new Labour government.

For Rogers to complain that Prince Charles “always goes round the back to wield his influence” is a bit much.

Rogers this week said of the prince: “The idea that he is a man of the people fascinates me. He is a man of the rich people, that is for sure.” As, surely, is Lord Rogers. Although he has confessed his “opposition to our present exploitative economic system”, he is intensely relaxed about working for the filthy rich and has long been a favourite architect for commercial developers. The stainless-steel pods on the Lloyd’s building, begun as Margaret Thatcher came to power, can now be seen as symbolically inaugurating the following three decades of profligate greed.

More recently, his firm designed for the Candy brothers the £400m group of luxury flats on the site of Bowater House in Knightsbridge. Now nearing completion and containing some of the most expensive apartments in Europe, this is even larger and more overweening than its mediocre modernist predecessor — and can give us a good idea of what his Chelsea Barracks development might have been like. As for the man himself, he lives in two grand stuccoed (listed) houses in Chelsea which he boasts of having gutted and turned “into a barn”.

Last year Lord and Lady Rogers made it into this newspaper’s Rich List with £52m, but he immediately complained, arguing that his practice — Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners — is owned by a trust so complicated that it is not possible to prove how much he is worth. So this year his name has been dropped.

Which brings me to another aspect of his behaviour. Rogers complains that “the prince does not debate and in a democracy that is unacceptable”. Yet, like many architects, he is acutely sensitive to criticism and reaches for his lawyers at the drop of a hat.

The most notorious case of this concerned Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn, first published in the United States in 1994. Brand made a number of observations about the Lloyd’s building, questioning both its “adaptivity” and its popularity. When Penguin proposed to publish a paperback version in the UK, Rogers’s lawyers insisted it was libellous. Penguin backed down. When the book was eventually republished to accompany Brand’s BBC television series, all mention of Lloyd’s and the Centre Pompidou had disappeared. So much for free speech.

Now I am not a devotee of Prince Charles and am happy to praise some work by the Rogers firm: the new terminal at Barajas airport at Madrid is magnificent and terminal 5 at Heathrow, despite the teething problems, is impressive. But I lament the fact that the battle of Chelsea Barracks is presented as a polarised choice between two ridiculous extremes: Rogers’s steel and glass versus the pedestrian derivative classicism of HRH’s favourite, Quinlan Terry. The hope now must be that a decent architect is employed who can embrace traditional masonry and who understands history and context.

I do, however, welcome the prince’s interventions. Ever since his “monstrous carbuncle” speech in 1984, he has managed to upset the smug modernist Establishment, and that must be a good thing. It is hugely entertaining that he has now managed to discomfit an overpraised, posturing, millionaire socialite architect.

For the real scandal of the Chelsea Barracks affair is not that Lord Rogers of Riverside has lost a plum job but that a site owned by the government — ie, us — should have been sold off so irresponsibly to the highest bidder and that it should now be in the hands of the dictatorial regime of a foreign state.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010