I never thought I would be a sucker for royalty, but there is now a good reason to admire Prince Charles. He hates Richard Rogers.

In August, the British press reported on the dismay of the nation’s “architectural profession, flinching at the prospects of another outburst along the lines of ‘monstrous carbuncle’ (the Prince’s dismissal of an extension at the National Gallery), ‘glass stump’ (his view of a plan for Mansion House Square), and ‘Victorian prison’ (his description of a new Plessey factory in Plymouth).” Apparently, Prince Charles has intervened in plans for a multimillion dollar project to redevelop the “area” around St. Paul’s Cathedral. The “area” in question happens to be London’s oldest and most beautiful, and the Prince’s concern was clear to all, including those who had watched his wedding at St. Paul’s six years earlier. Except, of course, for the nation’s architectural profession: “Architects are getting fed up with the Prince’s interference,” said Michael Manser, a past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), adding: “The trouble is, he has tremendous influence among people generally.” One proposal, favored by the judges, called for a ring of office blocks around the cathedral. Another favorite, still undisclosed at this writing, was an entry by Richard Rogers and Partners.

Richard Rogers is the subject of this column because of a coincidence. A few weeks ago, I happened to review the press clippings and public relations department memoranda of Lloyd’s of London, whose new city headquarters Rogers designed, over the period of 10 years: from the inception of the project to its completion. What is true of Rogers, it seems, is true of much of today’s architecture, art, and literature.

By 1977, when our story begins, Lloyd’s of London had been an internationally famous insurance market and a financial power second only to the Bank of England for nearly a century. It started, 300 years ago this year, as a riverside coffeehouse, where merchant seamen could exchange shipping gossip and later obtain insurance cover for their vessels and cargo. Despite the passing of centuries, Lloyd’s (incorporated as “a society of underwriters” by an Act of Parliament in 1871) had brought its unique tradition into the 20th century, refusing to become a limited-liability company and remaining, essentially, a place—where its members, liable to the full extent of their personal fortunes, could gather and do business. Since the membership continued to grow, it was not surprising that between 1928 and 1977 the bustling marketplace had outgrown its physical surroundings four times. This time, it all began with a lunch.

The idea was to seek “professional advice,” and a deputy chairman of Lloyd’s found himself sharing the intellectual equivalent of celery soup with Gordon Graham, then president of the august RIBA. His “professional advice” was simple enough: a list of six architectural practices. From these, Richard Rogers and Partners was eventually chosen. The six participants received, under the conditions of the competition the wise Mr. Graham devised, 10,000 pounds each to come up with—no, not designs (how vulgar!)—with ideas.

At first, Lloyd’s redevelopment committee was a little nervous. After all, the Yale master’s-course graduate’s main claim to fame was a little frightening. But Mr. Graham was reassuring: “I don’t know what you’ll get,” he is reported to have told the committee with the kind of vague optimism that is born of experience, “but you won’t get a Pompidou.”

Alas, a Pompidou, like the Pompidou Rogers had designed with Renzo Piano, was what they were in for. In essence, the notion was innocuous enough: to take Louis Kahn’s idea of separating the “served” space of the proposed building’s main atrium from the “servant” space around it, and. then take it to its logical—or, tragically for Lloyd’s, illogical—conclusion. Admittedly, the client’s brief to the architect did call for the creation of a single vast space, the “Room,” or floor, where the members could do their trading as they had done it for the past three centuries. But while Rogers’ steel-and-glass barrel-vaulted atrium, 15 stories high, would preserve that tradition, the proposed “inside-out” design violated every other tradition dear to the city: “Traditional buildings are dinosaurs,” Rogers told them. “Architecture is inseparable from ideology.”

Of all the quiet, conservative, staid institutions in the city of London, Lloyd’s had enjoyed the reputation of having the lowest profile, at least comparatively with its historic role. But, as history would have it, just about then the old club was attracting the unhappy attentions of government regulators. In the face of expected parliamentary intervention in its affairs, Lloyd’s reasoned, it was probably a good idea to be seen, at home as well as abroad, as a great international institution, rather than an “elitist” meeting place. The glass, “inside-out,” democratic facade was just the thing.

I interviewed one of Rogers’ partners, John Young. Around the table in his Hammersmith office overlooking the Thames were four chairs: three angular and spiked affairs, in one of which I had to sit, and his own, a comfortable swivel armchair of the kind used by doctors, accountants, and other ordinary people. (His secretary, a pert young thing of the kind doctors, accountants, and other ordinary people employ, had told me how he designed the three chairs, so I kept quiet on this score.) Smiling with satisfaction, Mr. Young, responsible for the actual construction of the Lloyd’s building, recalled those “early days” on the site: “Lloyd’s didn’t know what sort of building they were going to get.”

In those “early days,” the client received monthly reports from the architects, outlining the progress of the design, and approved it little by little. It may be recalled how successfully this “incremental” technique was used by the tailors in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Two years later, when the model was at last unveiled, “it wasn’t as if [Lloyd’s] hadn’t been a party to all the decisions,” Mr. Young told me, “and so they accepted it. If we had gone in and said ‘Here’s the model,’ they would have sent us on our way.” By 1979, the architects were so much in control that they were able to convince the client to appoint a Fine Arts Advisory Panel. Architects often have artistic friends. In fact, it is surprising that Andersen’s tailors never asked one of their friends to design invisible shoes.

When, seven years later, the new Lloyd’s building was ready, the differences, in the words of a Private Eye correspondent, “between the Tomb of Unknown Pompidou and the Lloyd’s Reinsurance Refinery” became apparent: “The former was a duet between Piano and Rogers, the latter is Rogers’ own bravura composition for wind and brass.” Surely, asked a Financial Mail reporter, “the underwriters’ activities at Lloyd’s deserve expression ahead of the technical systems that support them?” At Lloyd’s itself, city wits observed that it took them three centuries to move from a coffeehouse to a percolator.

On November 18, 1986, to the strains of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man adding that international-democratic touch, the Queen launched the “surreal engine of the mind,” in one writer’s phrase. The October 1986 issue of Architectural Review, published by RIBA, had just proclaimed, in one of its 10 articles on the new building, that it was the greatest masterpiece of architecture “to have arisen in the City of London since Sir Christopher Wren finally put the gold cross in the sky above St. Paul’s.” Unlike her outspoken son, who had compared the National Gallery extension to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend,” the Queen chose not to notice the intellectual nakedness of her subjects, noting merely that the building was “unlike any other.”

On second thought, even her subjects did not seem to have had much choice in the matter.