Rogers House, Wimbledon

22 Parkside was designed by Richard Rogers in 1968 as a total composition of house and garden. It was a prototype for an industrialized building with a long-life armature and a lightweight wrapping enclosing flexible space that drifts from inside to out.

Conceived as the house for his parents the house underwent many iterations over the decades and after nearly fifty years of constant use the original concept of house and garden became degraded by modification, material fatigue and neglect. Resulting in its recent restoration completed in 2017.

The building is listed Grade 2* because of its iconic status within the Richard Rogers oeuvre. The manner of its restoration is innovative and of significance for restorations of similar period structures.

In 2016 the building was gifted to Harvard GSD as an Urban Research Facility and lodging for two Fellows and together with the Rogers family a restoration was undertaken.

Gumuchdjian Architects won the limited competition to carry out the extensive works. Implementing the functional change and meeting institutional compliance standards required substantial re-construction that demanded a radical re-invention of the entrance sequence and the degraded components of the building.

Most of the roof, cladding and services, required replacement. Using archive material, the elements were re-designed within the aesthetic language of the kit of parts set by Rogers in 1968. It was important to enforce the preservation of Rogers emphasis on transparency between the buildings and their landscape.

The result is a building apparently restored to its original 1968 appearance but that is a complete re-application of the original architectural concept within a new garden designed by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. The totality is a subtle new interpretation of the original.

The restoration was carried out under Richard Rogers’ oversight, and it was enormously gratifying to see Richard and his close friend Renzo Piano visit the restored building, sitting together in the garden discussing the design some 50 years on.

Getting there: British Rail or tube to Wimbledon buses from Putney Bridge