By The Marquis
For some time, I have been waiting for the release of Léon Krier’s – the chief architect of Poundbury, Charles III’s model village – book on Corbusier, in the works since at least 2016, so I could publish my inevitably scathing review in J’accuse. As I discovered only two weeks ago, he sadly passed away before he could finish it, earlier this year. Instead, I have turned my gaze elsewhere.
I can think of three good things to say about the then Prince Charles’ 1989 A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture. One: it is mostly pictures and is printed in a very large font, which keeps the reading experience mercifully brief. Two: his watercolours, reproduced throughout, show promise. Three: it might usefully put to bed any lingering notions of Charles as a quietly erudite Philosopher King, who spends his afternoons buried in Guenon or Eckhart or Ibn Arabi. The thesis – the book is a rambling screed against Modernist architecture – is so predictable and well-trodden that it is almost not worth synopsising; a 20 second scroll through any number of accounts with names like ‘Traditional Western Aesthetics,’ or – a personal favourite – ‘London’s Lost and Living Pubs’ would produce basically the same insights (‘Our deepest desire is to live somewhere that feels like home,’ etc etc.) Everything Charles has to say is basically set out in the introduction, and what follows reads less like an essay than it does a montage of words.
What is most shocking is the quality of his prose. The passage I reproduce here gives a good sense of his trademark well-polished, magisterial style:
‘Developers always use an artist’s impression to seduce us into the Brave New Shopping World. But in reality, this New World turns out to be a kind of clinical laboratory where we are made to do our shopping.’
Poetry. Pure poetry.
Later on, in a section titled, ‘The Ten Principles,’ phrases like ‘Give us somewhere safe for the children to play and let the wind play somewhere else.’ and ‘Don’t rape the landscape’ – bold-type and quote marks not my own – hover ominously in the empty space toward the top of a page; free-floating demands, not quite subtitles, certainly not paragraphs, which seem to function more as illustration than language.
Published in 1989, the book closes off a decade-and-a-half of Charles’ spirited and very public meddling in the work of British architects – in 1974, he had a sausage-fingered hand in putting the kibosh on the proposed redevelopment of Covent Garden, foiled by the sudden and spurious ‘listing’ of over 250 buildings in the neighbourhood; Mies van der Rohe’s Mansion Square project – ‘a stump of glass,’ in Charles’ words – was thwarted by similar means in 1985, replaced with the obnoxious peaches-and-cream striped One Poultry building which now stands in its place; two years prior, after he had blocked an extension to the National Gallery, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects and all-round patriot, Owen Luder, had advised his colleagues to simply tell him, ‘Sod you.’
Despite his string of high-profile successes, Charles does not appear to have emerged from these scraps unscathed. A Vision of Britain is written in a smug, airy ‘I’m not upset. You’re upset.’ tone, peppered with the occasional break in character where he does strike the reader as, actually, in fact, in actual fact, quite upset. It feels like the work of a man whose ego is not unbruised by his opponents’ reproach that he is an uncredentialed hobbyist with too much free time on his hands, who needs to leave the business of architecture to more serious men. In order to prove once and for all that he is not an uncredentialed hobbyist with too much free time on his hands, he has gifted the world a book of his watercolour studies of the back garden.
For a contemporary reader, one of the chief reasons Charles’ critique falls flat is that the Brutalist style he is so inflamed by has now mostly disappeared; the grand Megalithic seriousness of buildings like Luder’s Tricorn Centre – a mildewed lump of elephant droppings, according to the then Prince, demolished in 2004 – has been replaced by something much more cloying and saccharine. The New Labour-Cameron Era vernacular. ‘Quirky’ skyscrapers like the Gherkin and the Walkie-Talkie, given appropriately ‘quirky’ names, like ‘The Gherkin’ and ‘The Walkie Talkie.’ Projects like the Scottish Parliament building, the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station or Westfield Stratford (all of these, by the way, are downstream of a book called Superdutch, chronicling the work of Dutch postmodernists like Rem Koolhaus and his acolytes, published in 2000), in which the hard concrete planes of the mid-20th century are replaced by strange, whimsical curves and rippling facades.
Crucially, it is a mode of architecture centred around the spectacle of public leisure. Developers produce artist’s renderings for residential developments in which, on their long, communal balconies, a hijabi nurse and an old woman share a Cuppa. And a Natter. In the forecourt below, there is A Boy with a Balloon. Since their presence is an obstacle to al fresco dining, motorists are treated as an enemy class. Pedestrianisation is the order of the day – but if you can Work From Home and, when the day is done, meander downstairs to the Puregym or the Everyman Cinema or the Côte Brasserie (with plenty of outdoor seating) on the ground floor of your building, who needs a car anyway? These developments might not look much like Poundbury, but they are nonetheless premised on identical assumptions about 21st Century urbanism – the pursuit of communal architecture. There are, I must admit, traces of this in the High Modernist work I am implicitly defending. Van Der Rohe envisioned that the square in front of Mansion House would become the site of live music and open air markets, and I have little doubt that had the project been realised, by now it would’ve become yet another grazing paddock for food-truck patrons – but this mauvais penchant was not yet the central theme that it would become toward the turn of the millennium.
The other major fault is that, in Charles’ bleary eyes, all architecture in Britain prior to the year 1910 blends into a single, undifferentiated notion of ‘tradition,’ and so particular styles or historical movements lose their essential significance. There is a wonderfully crystalline visual expression of this in Poundbury’s market square, where a Georgian townhouse has been plopped on top of a miniature triumphal arch.