Though insecure as a designer, Rogers nonetheless emerged as a leader within BBPR, relying on his strengths—his prominent editorial and public roles and his talent with words—to define the practice’s direction and profile. For example, in a series of presentations and articles on the Velasca published in Casabella, he placed emphasis on the dubbio metodologico, the design process through which the tower had gradually acquired its characteristic physiognomy. Built in reinforced concrete, using the most contemporary industrial materials, the tower also had to fit into a historically sensitive urban area by absorbing and reinterpreting the cultural and formal repertoire of its surroundings—its preesistenze ambientali. In this way Rogers deliberately used the project to call into question the idea that the outward appearance of a building could be regarded as a faithful indicator of its modernity. And, in taking the visual out of the equation, he reminded his contemporaries that Modernism was not so much a style as a way of designing in accordance with modern methods of construction and adopting a dynamic approach to problems.

The idea of looking beyond the external experience of a building was something that Rogers had started to appreciate during his time at the Politecnico di Milano, studying under the guidance of figures like Ambrogio Annoni and Piero Portaluppi. Annoni’s history course, rather than aiming at a purely stylistic reading of past architectures, proposed an investigation of the aesthetic and constructional reasons for buildings. His unorthodox case-by-case approach to preservation was underpinned by a mode of inquiry whereby one had to use one’s own best judgment, combined with rational method and artistic sensitivity, to tackle the problems at hand without referring to preconceived ideas or ideological strategies about what to preserve and how to do it. An essay that Rogers wrote for Annoni’s course is illustrated with a series of Wölfflin-inspired photographic juxtapositions. The images were cut out from books that he owned and assembled in rudimentary collages—even as a student, it seems, Rogers refused to analyze architecture through the sketch. Through these images he began to display a distinctive editorial approach as well as a certain freedom in juxtaposing past and present.

In those same years, between 1930 and 1932, and in parallel with his studies, Rogers published about 30 articles in Le arti plastiche—a magazine of art criticism edited by Vincenzo Costantini. Rogers mainly reported on art exhibitions in Milan, but he also wrote on architectural themes, and particularly on the work of Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, Henry van de Velde, and Auguste Perret. In the reflections on contemporary architecture published in Le arti plastiche, there were overlaps with the essay that Rogers had written while on Annoni’s course, both clearly expressing ideas, fueled by the febrile atmosphere of the 1930s, that would flourish in his later writings. The ambiguity of the Fascist regime’s cultural agenda allowed room for multiple competing images of the state, sparking inflammatory debates that played out in contemporary magazines like Casabella, then edited by Edoardo Persico and Giuseppe Pagano, or Giò Ponti’s Domus, both published in Milan; or Marcello Piacentini’s L’Architettura, the official mouthpiece of the state architects’ syndicate in Rome; or Quadrante, edited by Pietro Maria Bardi and Massimo Bontempelli, with bases in both Milan and Rome. With varying degrees of tolerance, all of these journals encouraged the expression of different points of view, spanning from the classicism of Piero Portaluppi through the refined Milanese novecentisti (20th-centuryists) to the Futurists and the avant-garde rationalism of Adalberto Libera and Giuseppe Terragni. These contrasting voices would coalesce to define a uniquely Italian strand of modernity, mercurial and continuously in crisis.

Through his writing, Rogers thrived in this intellectual milieu and, together with his associates, he became affiliated with its principal actors, starting with the circle around Pietro Maria Bardi, a distinguished writer, art critic, and gallery owner whose connections would give Rogers entry to the wider international networks of CIAM [Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne]. Bardi was an early adopter of the argument that modern architecture could serve the Fascist regime’s pursuit of rapid industrialization and modernization, as attested to by his articles for the Milanese paper L’Ambrosianoin 1930.

The cofounder, with Bardi, of Quadrante was the novelist and playwright Massimo Bontempelli. In the three years of its existence, from 1933 to 1936, Quadrante would galvanize contemporary Italian culture, politicizing architecture and transforming its practice in interwar Italy. Militant and fiercely intellectual, the journal managed to draw Italian politicians, practitioners, academics, and patrons into a cohesive movement that advanced the cause of modern architecture, adapting its principles to Italian culture while simultaneously promoting Italian Modernism to the rest of Europe (and to South America, where Bardi was to flee with his wife, Lina Bo Bardi, after World War II). The Quadrante circle used a variety of means to stimulate cultural debate, staging exhibitions at Bardi’s Galleria d’Arte di Roma and the Galleria del Milione in Milan, attending international congresses (every Italian delegate to CIAM contributed to the journal), inviting figures such as Le Corbusier to give lectures, building temporary installations at national expositions, and participating in official and professional boards. Giuseppe Bottai—who was at various times the Minister of Corporations, Minister for Education and Governor of Rome—was a supporter of the journal, while the industrialist Adriano Olivetti (one of rationalism’s key patrons) frequently argued in Quadrante’s pages in favor of the corporate development of Fascist politics; BBPR and Gruppo 7, among others, published urban plans based on those principles.

Years later, reflecting on the rather dubious start to his career within Quadrante’s circle, Rogers would write: “We based ourselves on a syllogism which went roughly like this: ‘Fascism is a revolution, modern architecture is revolutionary, therefore it must be the architecture of Fascism.’” In 1938, there was a sudden wake-up call for Rogers with the enactment of the racial-purity laws. He was obliged to disassociate himself from all work at the studio and was banned from publishing under his own name.