I'm proud as a fact that I've been able and I've been very fortunate to work with lots
of fantastic colleagues.
Right now I've changed the name of the firm so that it's Roger Sturke Harbour and partners
because at 80 you can see an end will be coming.
But I would like to think that my ethics going back to the Royal Academy exhibition, the
ethos of it, may continue.
We have a constitution where the partners gave up their ownership by charity.
We only do certain types of work and that has created a certain team spirit.
So I'm proud of all those things.
I'm proud about the fact that I have been able to live at a time when I've been able
to make use of my abilities.
On one side Britain has now very good architects, very good modern architects.
And you could argue that there's no nation that has better.
The Pritzker Prize, which is sometimes talked about as the Nobel Prize of architecture.
There's probably more architects who've got Pritzker population in England than anywhere
else.
Maybe Japan would be their competitor.
So the architecture is there.
Political interests never be much and every now and then you get a bit of a flare.
And I certainly have tried to work on it and I work in the House of Lords and I usually
participate when there's things about the built environment.
And in one way it is better.
I mean if you go to the city of London it's pretty good.
I was coming out the other day from the design museum on the other side of Tower Bridge and
I thought I was in New York with all these towers and lights on.
Now I'm not saying it's good or bad but it's very exciting.
It's very dynamic.
It's something which was impossible before.
I think what has left, and in my generation, and I don't believe one can say it's better
or worse, in my generation every architect that left school, and I left the Archer Show
Association in the 50s, and then I went on to Yale, everyone went to work for schools
department, hospital department, housing departments of the local county council, education establishments
and so on.
I worked on schools.
Actually I'm going to say 90% of the students that I and who left with me, they went to
work.
That would be natural.
In other words, the idea was you would build for the future.
We just had a horrible war and there was this very strong feeling, not by one party by the
way, possibly more by one party, about the welfare state.
The state could be enriched by the way that we played out our responsibilities.
This has gone.
It is much more an age of greed, especially in the sense of when we were watching the
economic crisis of the last years, it is very much about dog eat dog, and the acceptance
that it doesn't matter what you earn, you have no duty to society.
I think it's reflected in some of the things we do, I often point out to Finland, where
the teachers get the same money as surgeons.
Of course, therefore teachers are recognized in their important role.
We don't.
That goes throughout everything.
It's nothing to do about architecture, that's about society.
But it is a very exciting time and now we're looking at an international world and we weren't
doing it when I was 50 years ago, when I started doing architecture.
Paris was pretty international in the sense of going across the channel.
We can make use now, again, we're fortunate, we can make use of a much wider network of
communication and therefore change and adapt to that network.
I wouldn't say that things are ugly, but we have to be very wary of protecting the
public domain.
