Re: [Diggers350] Prince Charles’s 10 principles for architecture – and 10 much better ones

[Simon Fairlie]

Thjs article and its posting on diggers by the moderator of the site  
is a manifestation of an obsessive dislike of Prince Charles rather  
than any reasoned assessment of what is happening to our metropolitan  
architecture.

The Guardian has it in for Prince Charles because it has persisted in  
employing trendy, sports car driving, architecture correspondents who  
spend all their column inches puffing up the phallocratic erections  
of  their neo-brutalist heros.

The esteemed moderator of this site  has always manifested a  
perversely over-exaggerated hatred of Prince Charles, whom some of us  
have a little bit of respect for because he is the only hippie head  
of state we, or anyone else,  is ever likely to get.

To blame Prince Charles for No 1 Poultry is perverse. Charles opposed  
the criminal demolition of the magnificent Mappin and Webb flat iron  
building on the site, by Palumbo, and anything erected on this site  
in replacement was bound to be inferior. See a pic of the Mappin and  
Webb building on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappin_%26_Webb

The climax of the Guardian's anti Charles campaign came  when they  
accused the Prince of meddling in the banal redevelopment of Chelsea  
barracks by the Qatari royal family. According to the Guardian it was  
OK for Qatari royals to dictate what happens to the London skyline,  
but not for UK royals to object.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jun/25/chelsea-barracks-trial- 
prince-charles


Simon Fairlie
Monkton Wyld Court
Charmouth
Bridport
Dorset
DT6 6DQ
01297 561359
chapter7 at tlio.org.uk

http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/
http://www.thescytheshop.co.uk/

On 28 Dec 2014, at 02:04, Zardoz Greek zardos777 at yahoo.co.uk  
[Diggers350] wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>
> ------------------------------------
> Posted by: Zardoz Greek <zardos777 at yahoo.co.uk>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Diggers350 - an e-mail discussion/information-share list for  
> campaigners and members of THE LAND IS OURS landrights network  
> based in the UK
> http://www.tlio.org.uk
> http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Land-Is-Ours-a-landrights- 
> campaign-for-Britain/125281497524632
>
> The list was originally concerned with the 350th anniversary of The  
> Diggers (& still is concerned with their history). The Diggers  
> appeared at the end of the English Civil war with a noble mission  
> to make the earth 'a common treasury for all'. In the  
> spring of 1999 there were celebrations to remember the Diggers  
> vision and their contribution.
>
> TASH FROM THE HILL
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWk9rRJsk5I
>
> THE LAND MAGAZINE
> Subscription is £24 for five issues, single copies are £5 including  
> postage
> Published roughly every six months (Jan and June)
> http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/ (incl.online ordering with Paypal)
> Many articles online - and downloaded with pictures as PDFs for free.
> All enquiries gill at thelandmagazine.org.uk
>
> THE SCYTHE SHOP (advertisement)
> There is a revival of scything in the UK. Scything summer growth by  
> hand is usually quicker than using a strimmer, and there is no  
> noise, vibration or pollution. http://www.thescytheshop.co.uk/
>
> Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
> Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
> Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
> Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
> Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
> Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
> http://www.bilderberg.org/land/gift.htm
>
> Woe to those who join house to house and field to field, until  
> there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst  
> of the land. Yahweh of heaven's armies has sworn in my hearing:  
> "Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful  
> houses, without inhabitant." Isaiah 5:8-9
>
> http://www.downingstreetmemo.com
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo Groups Links
>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/private/diggers350/attachments/20141228/99c3ed8c/attachment.html>