Richard Rogers, who has just died at the age of eighty-eight, was one of the most important architects of the last hundred years, in any country. Buildings such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris or Lloyds of London in the square mile will stand for generations as titanic achievements, works of architecture that are as wild and exciting as any Gothic cathedral. Unlike those architects—dominant during his heyday, the 1980s and 1990s—who disdained any sort of social responsibility, Rogers was a social thinker. In 1992, he co-wrote A New London, a manifesto on housing, architecture, and planning with the then-Labour shadow culture secretary, Mark Fisher, and after 1997 he would sit in the House of Lords as a Labour peer. He was a close ally of John Prescott in the Urban Task Force of the New Labour years, and an adviser to Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London.

But Rogers wasn’t just a behind-closed-doors bureaucrat—the party-political side of his work would come out in a half dozen mini-manifestos for open, dense, public, and ‘European’ cityscapes, which were friendly, accessible and humane. Given that Rogers believed that architecture and politics were inextricably linked, it’s only fair to remember him as a political architect.

Rogers came from the European architectural aristocracy—he was born into the Anglo-Italian community of Florence, and his great uncle was the major Italian modernist Ernesto Nathan Rogers—before moving to Surrey at the end of the ’30s. Perhaps this experience was one reason he never showed any sign of the love for suburbs, ‘villages’, and garden cities so endemic in England. Why have Leatherhead as your model when you could have Florence? His most interesting work as an architect would always be about a fusion of the futuristic side of modern architecture—machine-made parts, steel and glass, a new sense of scale and space—with some very traditional continental European values, which often sat oddly in England: apartment buildings over houses, community over privacy, public squares and open spaces over private gardens and high fences.

Rogers’ breakthrough building was the Centre Pompidou in Paris, co-designed with Renzo Piano and the engineer Peter Rice. It is an immense, brightly colour-coded steel frame, with its services—ducting, pipework, lifts, escalators—pushed out onto the surface to free up a space that could be internally changed and reconfigured, with a large public square in front of it. Until airport-style scanners were installed recently, it was gloriously public—you could just wander in off the street, go up the escalators to see one of the best views of Paris, see a film, see one of the world’s best art collections, or just sit in front of it in that huge sloping piazza, tolerating some dubious street performers.

It has been blamed by the more boring Parisian ’68-ers, the sort of people who both believe (correctly) that Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century rebuilding of Paris was aimed at subjugating the Parisian working class and also (bizarrely) that nothing else should be built there ever again, for ‘destroying’ the Les Halles district. Yet ironically Rogers and Piano’s sources were in the utopian architecture of the ’60s—the Situationists’ New Babylon, the dream-projects of the Japanese Metabolists, the Fun Palace of the architect Cedric Price and the Communist theatre director Joan Littlewood.

You can see the Pompidou as the ‘recuperation’ of these revolutionary ideas, making them safe for capitalism, or you can see this enormous public project as the building that converted these works on paper into a real place that millions of people could freely enjoy, a divide which generally indicates how pessimistic your politics are. For me, the Centre Pompidou stands along with Stockholm’s contemporary Kulturhuset as a model of what a public building can be.

Rogers usually referred to ‘the Pompidou’ as ‘the Centre Beaubourg’, its original name, so as to avoid acknowledging its renaming after the Gaullist politician who commissioned it. The building has been pinned, along with Sydney Opera House, as the font of all ‘iconic’ ‘regeneration’ architecture—visually dazzling, endlessly photographable, aimed at tourists—but the insight Rogers took from its success is that people wanted urban things. This was not an out of town mall, it was not a suburb, it was a city building and proud of it.

This is one way of explaining the fact that Rogers was once held in suspicion by some on the left.  In the mid-’80s, his firm was commissioned by a developer to come up with plans for a private office and residential complex on Coin Street, on the South Bank of the Thames. These plans were rejected by the radical Greater London Council, in favour of the housing co-operative advocated by local residents. This was a good thing, socially, without doubt, but in its first phase of low-density houses facing away from the Thames, Coin Street was architecturally drab and introverted (it got better, surely partly under the influence of Rogers’ own ideas).

At that point, the architects who had the ear of the Left were in what was usually called Community Architecture, or the New Architecture Movement. This movement has been rediscovered of late, with good reason, for its attention to the race and gender inequalities too many architects prefer to ignore, but there’s also a good reason why it was for so long forgotten. For these architect-activists, the process came first—who benefits, who chooses—and the design came a distant second, in an oddly puritan rejection of the spatial and textural possibilities of architecture. Their total rejection—which now looks very over-the-top—of the modernist housing that followed 1945 meant that flats, density, scale, the sublime, architectural excitement, and all the things Rogers excelled at were among several babies thrown out with the bureaucratic bathwater.

As a rule, what the New Architecture Movement and ‘Community Architecture’ did was ask people what they wanted—which was, usually, ‘a house, that looks like a house, preferably a semi, with a garden’, and then, when they could, they gave them it. Rogers would give people something they didn’t know they wanted—in some cases, something he didn’t even know he wanted. As the design of Lloyds of London developed while under construction in strange, violent, surreal directions that were hardly anticipated by the rough sketches made in 1978, Rogers was asked by the client, ‘Why didn’t you tell us it would look like this?’ He replied, ‘Because I didn’t know.’

Famously, Rogers was dyslexic, and couldn’t draw—in his 1970s and 1980s work, you can see architecture as not a matter of signatures and icons but something open-ended, created collectively, by a team. The results, from the INMOS Factory in Newport to the Kabuki-Cho building in Tokyo, are still thrilling.

The best Rogers buildings were not just about purpose, they were for pleasure—and those pleasures were, in theory, there to be enjoyed by everyone, not just those who used the structures every day. In this, the astonishing Lloyds Building in London is in some ways exemplary—passing it on the street, there is such a huge amount to see. This beautifully crafted metal exoskeleton, with its pods of offices, its spiky skyline, its Crystal Palace glass vault, its Bladerunner external lifts zooming up and down, can be looked at over and over across the course of a lifetime, always seeing something different. In an era where architects and planners were obsessed with facile semiotics—what does a building resemble, what does it ‘say’, what does it symbolise, where does this building put you in the class pecking order—these buildings were pure hedonism, architecture with all the crackle and complexity of a Detroit techno track. If this is what’s possible, why settle for less? It’s no wonder that Labour politicians eventually stopped dreaming of cul-de-sacs and took notice.

Except of course these buildings did have a function, too. From the mid-’80s on, most of Rogers’ clients were big businesses, such as Lloyds themselves, a venerable City of London underwriter and a backer of the slave trade. A contradiction opened up between Rogers as author and as architect which would grow wider and wider. The books, whether slim volumes like Cities for a Small Planet, Architecture: A Modern View, Cities for a Small Country, or political reports like A New London and Towards an Urban Renaissance, praised the public city, public housing and public space, against the privatised world of Canary Wharf, Docklands, and a thousand Barratt Homes estates, blasted the ignorance of Prince Charles, and imagined a new social democratic settlement. In the mid-’90s, as the long Tory rule finally came to a close, in the TV series Building Sights, Rogers took the viewer through the London County Council’s 1950s Alton Estate, describing it as still a viable model for the socialist city of the future.

And yet, his real-life clients were mostly banks and property developers. As a writer before 1997, Rogers proposed the Thames being turned from an industrial conduit into a continuous public promenade, for popular enjoyment and relaxation; and as an architect after 1997, he helped fill it with a continuous wall of completely unaffordable luxury apartment blocks.

Of course, there were public works within this. The Welsh Parliament in Cardiff, for instance, shows a softening of Rogers’ wild metal-on-metal style of the 1970s and 1980s, a development of his work into a new eco-modernism which was too seldom seen among all the dull ‘stunning developments’ on the riversides. The Senedd, though, is still a grand and proud public building, as it should be. His firm, Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, have recently built some decent modest schemes in London for temporary housing for homeless people in London.

But, for the most part, they have seemed to think that building for oligarchical clients in a ‘public’ way is in some sense a public good—that a new square is worth five towers of plutocratic safety deposit boxes. Rogers’ firm has always refused to build for the military, or to build prisons, but beyond that principle and practice usually depart from each other. In 2006, Rogers the socialist helped found Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine; within weeks, when it looked like it might threaten his firm’s commissions, Rogers the businessman publicly disavowed the organisation.

Rogers’ career as an urban theorist and policymaker exemplified the way that New Labour tried to do social democratic things with neoliberal methods—a nice new landscaped river path would be paid for by those giant new flats that nobody you’ve ever met can afford to live in. That model is not just immoral, it is utterly bankrupt.

However, at a time in which the Left is again at risk of becoming cowed, paranoid, and introverted, we can learn something else from Rogers’ best work. Cities are there for us to enjoy, and buildings should exist for our pleasure. Architecture isn’t just a cult for a small group of initiates, and it isn’t some abstract form of knowledge which isn’t connected to real buildings. In Rogers’ best architecture you can still glimpse a better world.