Events | 2009.05.17
Charles should stick to his guns. The carbuncle crew are still hard at work | Simon Jenkins
The glass boxes, blobs and phalluses thrown up now by architects show little has changed since the prince\'s 1984 speech
So is it over? The culture war between the Prince of Wales and the doyens of modern architecture has been running for a quarter century. It was supposedly ended on Tuesday night at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London where the massed ranks of the profession sat in dark suits and politely applauded.
The prince\'s 1984 "carbuncle" speech depicted architects as self-obsessed popinjays strutting the streets of Britain, smashing and sneering at anything traditional and erecting cheapjack glass and steel memorials to their egos. It caught a public mood, not just for who he was but for what he said. It also struck a professional nerve. Those who consider themselves artists hate their work being discussed (as opposed to adored) by laymen, even when the work is as public as architecture. Architects see themselves as surgeons gathered round the body of the urban environment, unquestioned in their authority over it.
The shamelessness of the prince\'s attack sustained decades of visceral hatred. Architects insulted him as archaic, luddite, whimsical, lost in translation from the middle ages. They seldom addressed his argument but claimed that he had lost them fees, and without being elected. He replied, in as many words, that they had lost him whole cities without being elected.
The prince must be the last public figure to take architecture seriously. Perhaps that was why the RIBA audience received his half-kiss and make up so warmly. To a profession that often seems interested only in icons and cash – witness magazines such as Architects Journal and Building Design – he ruminates on style, tradition and context. In among the herbivore organics and holistics, he is clearly plugged into a public mood.
So is the clash of the titans over? I think not. Tuesday\'s speech was an attempt to forge a consensus between the prince and those architects who win big public commissions and city centre renewals. The prince duly apologised for having, 25 years ago, "kick-started some kind of style war between classicists and modernists". All he wanted, he said, was to "value the lessons of history", to plead for an architecture of context, of "natural patterns and rhythms … that respected courtesy, consideration and good manners".
I cannot see why the prince should apologise. His carbuncle speech was the call (among others) that saved Trafalgar Square from not one but two frigid glass boxes, and spurred a genuine debate about urban design, the better for being often bad-tempered. He made the British talk about beauty, a subject they hate. Architects, like Tate artists, revel in the barren thesis that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and the RIBA). It is not. It is in the eye of everyman.
The debate has never died. It is kicking dust down at the old barracks site in Chelsea, where a proposed cluster of towers in a park by Lord Rogers, in the style of postwar Roehampton, is pitted against a terrace by Quinlan Terry in the even older style of Wren. In support of the latter, the "unelected" prince has written to the unelected owner of the site, the Qatari royal family, while the unelected architects have written to the unelected press. Never has the concept of franchise been so abused.
Despite a plea for a few joint seminars, a hopeless gulf still separates the prince\'s argument from that of the modernists. The best line on Tuesday was from the RIBA\'s president, Sunand Prasad, that his profession had put behind it the postwar obsession with ugliness, traffic and grandiose planning as so much "car-bungle". But I see no RIBA truth and reconciliation commission, no inquiry into system-building or deck-access, into traffic separation or street-in-the-sky. Architects who welcomed the destruction of Georgian and Victorian neighbourhoods even tried recently to get the "brutalist" Robin Hood estate in east London preserved, as one of theirs. They know no irony.
The energy-guzzling glass boxes, lumps, blobs and phalluses now emerging from architects\' computer programmes show how little has changed. They stand empty in London\'s Docklands and the City, their cranes waving idly in the wind, like Shelley\'s trunkless legs of stone. Rogers\'s latest work, a bling apartment block for the Candy brothers in Knightsbridge – shrieking money – is wildly overbearing for its site. I doubt if today\'s Westminster planners know what that means.
There is no meeting of mind or eye between such icons and the prince\'s plea for context and courtesy. There is no meeting of wood, brick and stone with cold steel and plate glass. There is certainly no meeting of skyscraper and curtain wall with Britain\'s urban vernacular of high-density, low-rise streetscape. It is as if Jane Jacobs, 1960s champion of the privacy and social cohesion of the city street, had never written.
The prince is unfair in appearing to blame architects alone. All are subject to planning and thus to a political process. It is not architects who should be blamed for the carbon-wasting destruction of acres of central Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. The current Pathfinder demolitions in the Midlands and north, championed by Yvette Cooper as housing minister, were the result not of architects (though they were eager consultants) but of too much public money and political arrogance.
Nor can the prince, whose constitutional power is zero, be said to "abuse his position" in commenting on style. He commands publicity, but so do architects, whose peerages, publicists and influential access have been deployed against the prince. As adviser to the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, Rogers vigorously fuelled the poor man\'s obsession with architectural virility. Like Lord Foster, he leaves the prince far behind as a master lobbyist.
Provincial city fathers are often persuaded that a crazy skyscraper will somehow bring life to miles of run-down derelict land, yet the public votes for a quite different architecture when allowed to choose for itself. On the executive estates beloved of John Prescott as planning minister, they crave neo-Georgian, neo-Tudor, neo-traditional. They are derided by richer professionals who can afford the real thing for opting for "pastiche", yet they are seeking within their price range precisely the qualities espoused by the prince. Democracy is about choice. If architects were democrats, they would be with the prince.
Many modern designers have worked well within the rhythm of existing city streets, from Terry Farrell\'s Covent Garden triangle to Richard McCormack\'s new BBC. Most do not merit naming, because their essence is discretion not ostentation. It is big money that seems to drives architects crazy, as it does bankers and politicians.
The solution lies, as always, in debate and transparency. I am not aware of any choice of design being offered for the Chelsea barracks site to the public bodies which discuss it? Yet these are not esoteric games for drawing-room argument. They are the public realm.
We can avert our eyes from most art forms, but not from modern architecture. Too much of it has devastated Britain\'s cities, making too many mistakes for the RIBA\'s Prasad to dismiss them as history. The profession\'s refusal ever to confront its past remains a scandal. It is not for the prince to make his peace with architecture. It is for architecture to make its peace with people.
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
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