Prince Charles’s 10 principles for architecture – and 10 much better ones

[Zardoz Greek]

Prince Charles’s 10 principles for architecture – and 10 much better ones
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/27/prince-charles-10-principles-architecture-10-better-ones

He’s infuriated architects for more than 30 years – but Prince Charles’s new set of rules for architectural practice might be his silliest intervention yet
Prince Charles visit to Poundbury, Dorset, Britain
 A spurious notion of What People Really Want …Prince Charles in Poundbury, the housing development he created in Dorset. Photograph: Paul Grover/REX
Douglas Murphy
Saturday 27 December 2014 08.30 GMT

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp
Shares
314
Comments
85
An unpleasant sense of deja vu occurs every time HRH The Prince of Wales comes down from Balmoral to pipe up about contemporary architecture. For more than 30 years now, he’s been the bane of the architectural profession, wielding his accidental power to influence the design not only of individual buildings and projects, but the entire debate about what architecture is, who it is for and what it should look like. So when the Architectural Review recently published his series of 10 principles for architecture, it was hard to know whether to go apoplectic or simply roll one’s eyes: “It’s that man again … ”

Advertisement

It all began with what should have been an innocuous after-dinner speech, when Charles was invited to address the Royal Institute for British Architects’ 150th anniversary dinner on 30 May 1984. But instead of congratulating them all for doing such a jolly good job, he took the opportunity to excoriate the profession and their modern designs, with his immortal description of the proposed extension to the National Gallery in London as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. What was remarkable was not so much the ferocity of the Prince’s attack, but its success: the design for the extension was dumped, and the career of its architects, ABK, nosedived. In its place, a jokey and quite flimsy fake-classical design by Venturi Scott-Brown stands there today.

Advertisement

In the same speech, the prince managed to kill off an office block by the legendary German architect Mies van der Rohe, which was to be situated near the Bank of England; instead we got the garishly postmodern No 1 Poultry building by Stirling/Wilford. Later, in 1987, Charles criticised a scheme for Paternoster Square next to St Paul’s Cathedral by his bete noir Richard Rogers, saying “you have to give this much to the Luftwaffe, when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble”. Rogers’ scheme was quickly dropped.

No 1 Poultry city of london
 Prince Charles’s interference led to the cancellation of a new Mies Van Der Rohe building in the City of London; instead, we got the garishly postmodern No 1 Poultry. Photograph: Alamy
Over subsequent years, in publications such as his Vision for Britain, Charles gave us his eccentrically hyperbolic opinions on other modern designs: John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library of 1974 (now sadly being demolished) looked like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept”, while the British Library by Colin St John Wilson was “more like the assembly hall of an academy for secret police”. This would all be rather entertaining if it weren’t for the fact that, over the years, Charles has thrown his royal privilege around with total abandon, most recently getting directly in touch with the Qatari royal family to get Richard Rogers – who by this point had been m ade Baron Rogers of Riverside – thrown off the project to redevelop the Chelsea Barracks.

But it wasn’t just his power that made Charles’ polemics hit home: they coincided with Britain’s great lurch to the right. By the time Charles was making his pleas for traditional design based upon “timeless” principles, the dismantling of the welfare consensus of the postwar world was in full swing. Rejecting modern architecture went hand-in-hand with fighting the unions, deregulating the planned economy, smashing industry and rejecting the spectre of socialism that had almost ruined Britain. During this time Charles surrounded himself with a posse of traditionalist oddballs such as Quinlan Terry, who believes classical architecture is an expression of “divine order”, and Leon Krier, much of whose career has been spent trying to redeem the decidedly mediocre neo-classical architecture of Albert Speer, the Nazi minister for armaments during the second world war.

Charles and his friends like to portray themselves as the underdogs, as victims of a leftie conspiracy of inhumane modernism, but they couldn’t be more well connected, and their polemics in favour of twee cottage architecture resonate strongly with a public taste for the picturesque and sentimental, and the spurious notion of What People Really Want. Indeed, despite protestations to its radicalism, the Prince’s own housing development of Poundbury in Dorset is itself more or less indistinguishable from any number of Noddy-house developments up and down the country.

The now-condemned Birmingham Central Library
 The now-condemned Birmingham Central Library is just the kind of modernist building Prince Charles set himself against in the late 1980s. Photograph: Alamy
So what is he saying now, in his 10 points for “sustainable” urban growth? Well, it’s essentially a mix of the sensible, the tautological and the downright sinister. The opening gambit is strong: not only is the Prince not interested in “turning the clock back to some Golden Age”, but his thoughts and ideas about architecture are all about the challenges of the future, of housing the 3 billion extra people projected to be on the planet by 2050, and housing them in a sustainable, resilient manner. If we are to achieve this, he believes, we are going to have to rediscover traditional approaches to architecture, which developed over millennia, and were abandoned in a so-called “progressive” modern age.

The prince believes in certain things that have become truisms in architecture and planning, things even Richard Rogers would agree with: that the dominance of the car in the late-20th century was a terrible development, and that in fact the pedestrian street is the most important artery connecting the different mixes of uses and functions within a community. As a result, urban density – once considered one of the primary sources of slum misery – is definitely in. Charles himself offers Kensington and Chelsea as an example of high-quality, high-density urbanism, but then, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

He is on shakier ground when he emphasises that buildings must “relate to human proportions”, a statement so obvious it is essentially meaningless – even the tallest skyscraper has human-sized WC cubicles, after all. What he means is that architecture should return to the harmonic principles of the classical orders of ancient architecture, themselves inspired by the sacred geometry of what Charles insists on calling “nature”. Here we’re in more sinister territory. According to Charles, nature’s order is “innately beautiful”, the harmonic and geometrical division of circles “displays the order which is sacred to all things”, and this language, this geometric grammar, “communicates directly to people by resonating with their true being”. In this scheme, the geometric rose windows of a medieval cathedral, as “physical manifestations of the Divine order of the universe”, are inherently beautiful – but are we also to understand
 that the concrete windows of Le Corbusier’s brutalist La Tourette monastery, themselves designed in accordance with a mathematical harmonic system, are also beautiful? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Corbusier's Monastery of la Tourette
 Corbusier’s La Tourette Monastery was designed in accordance with a mathematical harmonic system, which is just the kind of thing Prince Charles espouses – but would he approve of this example? Photograph: Philippe Merle/AFP
In the end, what it boils down to for HRH the Prince of Wales is that designing according to nature’s order fulfils humanity on the “physical, communal, cultural and spiritual levels”. But he is disingenuously silent about why “traditional” architecture was superseded in the first place. What he wishes to ignore is that, since the industrial revolution, the human environment has changed, for ever. New building technologies such as steel and glass superseded stone and timber construction, allowing for new kinds of building for which there was literally no precedent. New modes of transit such as the railway changed the way humans experienced space and time, while the circulatory potential of the industrialised world allowed for global capitalism to develop. The modern architecture that the Prince hates so much became dominant after the war not only because it was cheaper and more efficient than traditional methods, but also because it embodied a
 modern world that actively wanted to cast off the traditional past – a past that had culminated in the carnage of the world wars.

At the end of the day, architecture doesn’t change the world, but it offers us a picture of how people see themselves in it. In the 20th century, it was considered preposterous to build traditionally in an industrialised world that was exploring space, developing computers, and feeding and educating its people like never before; indeed, it’s telling that modern architecture only became discredited when the crises of the 1970s kicked in and progress itself was put in doubt. When Charles blasts modern architecture, he is essentially blasting the historical processes set in motion by the industrial revolution, and lamenting the diminution of his royal power in the world that it brought about. His dreams of traditionally designed cities are dreams of a world where people forever know their place.

Charles’s 10 key principles …
• Developments must respect the land

• Architecture is a language

• Scale is also key

• Harmony: neighbouring buildings ‘in tune’ but not uniform

• The creation of well-designed enclosures

• Materials also matter: local wood beats imported aluminium

• Limit signage

• Put the pedestrian at the centre of the design process

• Space is at a premium – but no high-rises

• Build flexibility in


… and Douglas Murphy’s
• The city belongs to everyone

Public space gets ever more murkily private; we need to redress the balance of who owns what. It’s people like the Prince that stand to lose out.

• Your home is not a castle

We’d be a far more equal and civilised island if the desire for home ownership wasn’t pandered to at every turn.

• Architecture is not a language

The idea of an underlying grammar to architecture implies urban life peaked in the piazzas of Renaissance Florence – a period of pestilence, gangster princes and public executions.

• But architecture can still be read

Buildings have no language. But the mightiest palace and the tiniest shed can tell us how those who build see the world and their place in it.

• Mimesis is not mimicry

Talented architects can work with classical traditions in contemporary architecture. It’s unlikely Charles would recognise this if he saw it.

• Honesty is still a virtue

The architectural era Charles helped usher in was filled with inane jokes and frivolous nonsense. Architecture doesn’t need to be fun.

• The street isn’t everything

It’s right that the importance of the street is recognised, but we must avoid turning city centres into identical forests of privatised space.

• Nature is not our friend

On respecting nature, let us quote Werner Herzog: “There is a harmony [to nature] – it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder”.

• Harmony involves dissonance

Cities must improve their interactions with the natural world. This does not mean architecture must copy natural forms; rather it must reconcile itself with cycles of energy and material.

Change is coming

The next century will be pivotal for humanity, and architecture will play a huge role. Cute cottages with nice local stonework won’t help.

• Douglas Murphy is the author of The Architecture of Failure

Architecture  Prince Charles  Monarchy
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp
 The GuardianSoulmates
 Two for one entry for Tate exhibitions
Two for one entry for Tate exhibitions
Subscribe to Soulmates and get two for one entry to selected Exhibitions at Tate Britain, Tate Modern and Tate St Ives.

View Tate offer
related content

Gingerbread architecture - in pictures
5dGingerbread architecture - in pictures

Australia's national architecture awards 2014 – in pictures
6 Nov 2014Australia's national architecture awards 2014 – in pictures
So much architecture is monstrous – that’s why we like to see it demolished
Jonathan Jones
28 Jul 2014270 comments So much architecture is monstrous – that’s why we like to see it demolished

Antony Gormley: sculpting a new South Bank
25 Nov 2013104 comments Antony Gormley: sculpting a new South Bank
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
17 Feb 201233 comments Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Nuclear waste: Keep out – for 100,000 years
24 Apr 2011107 comments Nuclear waste: Keep out – for 100,000 years
in depth

I’m a child of Argentina’s ‘disappeared’
I’m a child of Argentina’s ‘disappeared’

Meet tech’s new concierge economy, where serfs deliver stuff to rich folk
John Naughton
Meet tech’s new concierge economy, where serfs deliver stuff to rich folk

Groundbreaking biofuel project brings new life to Cornish mine
Groundbreaking biofuel project brings new life to Cornish mine

Prince Charles’s 10 principles for architecture – and 10 much better ones
Prince Charles’s 10 principles for architecture – and 10 much better ones

Business review 2014 Boardroom dinosaurs and corporate ghosts
 Business review of the year in pictures
Boardroom dinosaurs and corporate ghosts

Eric Rohmer: everyday miracles of a New Wave master
Eric Rohmer: everyday miracles of a New Wave master
comments (85)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion.
Order by Newest Threads Collapsed
1 2 3 4 5

gruniadreader666
3h ago

0
1
looking at the picture above it doesn't appear to have one resident under the age of 60 or who isn't achingly middle class. Its a Ghetto for the Daily Mail reading, strictly consuming and tory voting barbarians who wish to strangle civilisation with bunting and drown it in tea.

One wonders if we should in fact look to the past for our urban design and construct walls around our cities to keep these kind of people beyond the pale where they belong.

Reply Report

Jon Hartley
3h ago

0
1
I'm delighted Charles continues to pour his ignorance and meddling almost exclusively into architecture. The more time he spends pissing in your tent the less he can spend pissing in everyone elses.

On the bright side for all of us he'll be gone some time in the next 20 years.

Reply Report Close report comment form 
Reason (optional)

Email (optional)
Report
View more comments
popular
Popular in art and design
Popular across the guardian
1
The 20 photographs of the year
2
Prince Charles’s 10 principles for architecture – and 10 much better ones
3
Santa's real workshop: the town in China that makes the world's Christmas decorations
4
In Pictures: Food for thought