"I'm going to have to watch my backside," said Richard Rogers casually. He's talking about winning the competition to design the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff. The building is to go on the exact site of the notoriously aborted Cardiff Bay Opera House - a design by Zaha Hadid that Rogers vociferously supported at the time. He knows all about the politicking that brought that project down. And he's prepared for a rough ride.
He's likely to get it. So far, the response in Wales is eerily similar to the Opera House saga. There is the same half-hearted stab at public consultation. The same suspicion from the local press. The same public votes being taken on the basis of one smudgy picture. History is repeating itself. Rogers is right to be on guard.
The sad fact is that Wales is British architecture's Bermuda Triangle, a graveyard of ambitious projects. Outsiders are disliked, and native talent is thin on the ground. Awards juries pass them by. Official decentralised grant-giving bodies have none of the clout of their English or Scottish equivalents - since Wales, being a relatively small principality, has little cash to give anyone apart from Far Eastern "inward investors" who fling up dumb sheds. But Rogers has previously bucked the trend by building a famously good microchip factory in Newport. He might get lucky again.
"Remember these are still early days," he says. "I'm always worried that the public and, worse, professionals, will take this as the last word. This is purely an opening gambit." Already, there's some confusion: his scheme is known locally as "the one with the glass balls" since on his model, he chose to depict trees as abstract spheres. He laughs at the thought of it. "I promise to get rid of the glass balls," he vows.
His building will be all about transparency. That, he says, is what modern democracy is about. There is a plinth stepping up from the waters of the Bay - soon to be a fresh-water lagoon rather than tidal mudflats - there is an upwardly-curving roof intended to welcome people in, and between the two is a transparent box. "I think we're now moving to a period where we, the public, wish to participate and see what the bosses - the government - are doing. I think that's absolutely critical," he says. "I talk a lot about a "democratic roof", something that will enclose the people as well as the government."
In form, Rogers' design is a modern temple - he acknowledges the Greek ideal of participatory democracy - with more than a nod to Japan. But this classical purity will be offset by organic, moving, shapes sprouting from the roof. These are combined light scoops and ventilators, intended to make the Assembly a "green" building that is light on energy consumption. The cynical might note that these are, after all, devices to extract hot air: a prerequisite of every parliament building since the Palace of Westminster disguised its vents in gothic finery in the mid 19th century. The remarks then from one of the palace's architects, Pugin, might almost apply to Rogers' scheme: "All Grecian, sir: Tudor details on a classic body".
