The newly proclaimed King Charles III has made himself an accidental enemy of architects for almost 40 years.
In May of 1984, he was invited to speak at the 150-year anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The gala evening at Hampton Court was held to celebrate the achievements of architect Charles Correa, who was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, but instead, the then-Prince of Wales took the opportunity to expose his traditionalist views about architecture and (unintentionally, he says) launched a “style war” against modernism.
He began his speech with a quip about becoming “the architectural equivalent of a practising hypochondriac,” before he quickly moved to take a swipe at the proposed extension to London’s National Gallery by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK), which he likened to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”
Four months later, the scheme was refused planning permission, to be replaced with the now-celebrated postmodernist scheme by Venturi Scott Brown; however, this too nearly fell on the scrap heap.
Charles was appointed to the board of the National Gallery by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1986. In a 1987 board meeting, the monarch expressed a view that a non-structural column on the Trafalgar Square facade of the Sainsbury Wing extension should be removed. “A column as an architectural feature should act as a support,” he declared. However, the architects argued the column, though decorative, was a reference to the original gallery’s classical portico. This time, the prince did not get his way. The dispute caused the architects to threaten to resign from the project. The board backed down, and both the column and the architect stayed.
In the same RIBA anniversary speech, Charles also attacked a Mies van der Rohe proposal for Mansion House Square, which was originally commissioned in 1962. “It would be a tragedy if the character and skyline of our capital city were to be further ruined and St Paul’s dwarfed by yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London,” he said. The proposal was later rejected by the UK Secretary of State for Environment in 1985. The site is now home to 1 Poultry, James Stirling’s monument of post modernism.
The speech inspired the Building Design magazine to introduce an annual award for the worst building in the UK named the “Carbuncle Cup”.
Visualisation of Mies van der Rohe’s Mansion House Square proposal.
Image:
Drawing Matter/Real Foundation/John Donat
But the prince had much more to say about modernist architecture. In a 1987 speech to Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee, he complained that the redevelopment of London was worse than the destruction cause by Nazi air force attacks on the city.
“Even the street where Shakespeare and Milton brought their manuscripts, the legendary Paternoster Row, ‘The Row’, the very heart of publishing since Elizabethan times, was turned into a concrete service road leading to an underground car park!” he said of a Richard Rogers scheme for Paternoster Square.
“You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that. Clausewitz called war the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Around St Paul’s, planning turned out to be the continuation of war by other means.”
And just like that, another one bites the dust. Rogers would fall foul of the prince’s “architectural hypochondria” twice more, with his schemes for the Royal Opera House and redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks were terminated after the prince’s behind-the-scenes interventions. The Guardian UK revealed that the prince wrote to the Qatari Royal Family, who owned the site of the former Chelsea Barracks, to express his views about Rogers’s proposal. Days before a planning decision was to be made about the project, Rogers’s practice was sacked.
“It knocked the stuffing out of me, and the design team even more,” Rogers told the Guardian in 2009. “We had hoped that Prince Charles had retreated from his position on modern architecture, but he single-handedly destroyed this project.”
“This sort of situation is totally unconstitutional and should never happen again,” he said, and called for public inquiry into the prince’s meddling. Many of Rogers’s contemporaries, including Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster, wrote an open letter arguing that the prince’s actions were “subverting the open and democratic planning process.”
The prince’s intervention also caused the developer to launch legal action against him, which was later settled, as well as calls to boycott his speech at RIBA to mark the 25th anniversary of his now infamous “carbuncle” speech.
For all of his meddling, the new monarch’s interests in architecture and urbanism are genuine, and he has continued to advocate for sustainable development and the environment.
“I don’t go around criticizing other people’s private artworks. I may not like some of them very much, but it is their business what they choose to put in their houses. However, as I have said before, architecture and the built environment affect us all,” he said in his 2009 speech at RIBA. “Architecture defines the public realm, and it should help to define us as human beings, and to symbolize the way we look at the world; it affects our psychological well-being, and it can either enhance or detract from a sense of community.”
He urged architects to look to nature in “a brave search for the underlying principles that give rise to these patterns everywhere we look” – a sentiment he repeated in an essay in The Architectural Review’s Big Rethink issue, in which he outlined his 10 key principles for sustainable development.
“We face the terrifying prospect by 2050 of another three billion people on this planet needing to be housed, and architects and urban designers have an enormous role to play in responding to this challenge,” he wrote.
“We have to work out now how we will create resilient, truly sustainable and human-scale urban environments that are land-efficient, use low-carbon materials and do not depend so completely upon the car. However, for these places to enhance the quality of people’s lives and strengthen the bonds of community, we have to reconnect with those traditional approaches and techniques honed over thousands of years which, only in the 20th century, were seen as ‘old-fashioned’ and of no use in a progressive modern age. It is time to take a more mature view.”
