Windsor was compared to a tomb and Buckingham to a department store; as for St. James's Palace, George III considered demolishing it and planting a turnip field on its site. As can be seen, when tracing the passion of Prince Charles of England for architecture, we must discard the genealogical route: more fond of horse breeding than of patronage of the arts, the Hanoverians and Windsors have earned the right for no one to confuse them with the Medicis. Perhaps it was—as some argue—an old tradition of dynastic philistinism; perhaps it only responded to the deep-rooted skepticism of the British towards any grand projet. Be it for one reason or another, the most prestigious Crown on earth did not even have the urge to erect a Versailles to perpetuate its glory. For this very reason, Prince Charles of England's intense—so eccentric—concern for architecture has caused greater astonishment. And it has reached the stature of a national debate.
Among those who consider him "the conscience of the nation" and those who see him as an "ill-informed" dilettante, that is the only merit everyone recognizes in him: having brought back into public conversation what is, par excellence, the great public art. For the rest, Prince Charles of England himself has always known that his opinions would give much ground to discredit. A proponent of urban planning endowed with human scale, and an architectural language attentive to the sense of place, it has indeed been tempting to prejudge his proposals as those of an irresponsible amateur. In this view, Prince Charles of England's aesthetic fixation would be no more than the hobby of an idle heir, touched —to make matters worse— by dandyism and reactionary nostalgias. "Some judge my opinions," confesses the Prince of Wales himself, "as opposed to progress and the needs of the contemporary world." It's an easily marketable caricature: after all, we are talking about a man who paints watercolors, who delights in Leopardi, and who has shown consistent interest in speculative agriculture or natural medicine. These are less popular causes than horse racing, and he himself has bitterly accused "the violent and vitriolic reactions" that his furor aedificandi has aroused here and there. Not in vain, if the most biting avant-garde censored his aesthetic postulates, the moderate segments of society also found reason for astonishment: with his attacks on the vedettariat of architecture, the prince seemed to violate those sacred precepts that, from the 19th century onwards, prevent the constitutional monarchy from "entering into political battles."
Thirty years after his first attacks against hyper-technologized architecture, Charles of England, however, has managed to earn respect, to affirm a serious consideration. He has merits. He has freed people, learned or unlearned, to criticize the arrogance of projects more photogenic than habitable. He has counted —from Leon Krier to Quinlan Terry— on not a few quality and weighty supporters. He has established, with speeches and books, a doctrinal body. And he has even managed —let's think of the community urbanism of Poundbury— to put his thought into practice against the priapism of skyscrapers and those concrete blocks where only rust and graffiti prosper. In passing, the Prince of Wales has been able to demonstrate that his preference "is not the result of looking for something to fill my day." It is, rather, the struggle for an architecture with a vocation for community and a desire for beauty and permanence.
If painting has been improvable and poetry insurmountable, architecture has figured as the most contentious of British arts. Perhaps that is why it already deserved the attention of a prince: equally eloquent when it comes to expressing the best and the worst, construction in the United Kingdom has fostered both the "satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution and the serene pomp of the great country houses.
Suffice it to follow a thought: Spanish life can be read through its painters; in contrast, the dramaturgy of English architecture naturally accompanies its national journey. We see it in the monastic colleges of Oxbridge and in the criminal streets of Ripper's London. It is equally in the age of optimism of its stations as in its Dickensian taverns and orphanages. It appears in the solemn liturgy of its Parliament, in the hopeless neighborhood of Trainspotting and in the "market towns" of Shakespeare's sweetness. It shines, finally, both in the Indian pavilions that speak to us of the Empire and in the new homes for multimillionaires with breathtaking views over the Thames. It is not idle to remember that the greatest British aesthetes would make their influence felt on architecture, urbanism and landscape, from the arcadian suggestions of Capability Brown to the guild dreams of William Morris, the archaizing fantasy alla Beckford or the look to the past, so reverent, of John Ruskin.
If England can be read lucidly through its buildings, it must be that—with the exception of a certain Holland—there has been no civilization more directly linked to domesticity. These are not features without political implications: houses are a sign of those contiguities characteristic of liberty and property, of that intimacy that allowed one to affirm that "an Englishman's home is his castle." Even its classicist style sought to connect with an idea of republican virtue. More prosaically, one does not need to read the complete catalog of Jane Austen to infer that her homes were also the setting for the beauty of art, for her model of man, for the sports and social rituals—tea, hunting, garden parties—of the English gentleman. But if those "houses of life" that were the country houses encoded "the matrix of British culture," neither can so many triumphs in the urban fabric be overlooked.
It is a commonplace to affirm, with Lord Kennett, that English cities are "a failure." And yet, it must be considered that England was the first of the great countries where the modern city was defined. At the beginning of the 19th century, only London had more than one hundred thousand inhabitants; in less than one hundred years, there were twenty-three more towns above that figure. For urban planning, the British were to coin an invention that balanced utility, beauty, and service to a high population density: those Georgian and Victorian terraced houses which, according to Harry Mount, have been the greatest contribution to the English constructive heritage and which, according to Nikolaus Pevsner, have been, simply, one of the greatest achievements of the European 18th century. Their prestige is still preserved: the most desired houses in London today, in Campden Hill Square, are a placid ensemble of Georgian harmonies. It is an architecture of order and well-being. Nevertheless—we are talking about Great Britain—let no one go overboard on the side of lyricism: very practical, the rows of Georgian and Victorian houses could extend endlessly, and their ornamentation could affirm variations, also endless, on the same theme.
In the country of John Soane and Robert Adam there is, therefore, an intelligible tradition to honor and emulate. It is a source as vernacular as it is open, enriched by the contribution of those visionaries and utopians—Titus Salt, Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City—who sought to strengthen social reform through the improvement of urban space. In the end, the sum yields such a gravitation of the past that there is a congruence in Scruton's assertion: from the 19th century onwards, the conservationist endeavor has been "the most fertile intellectual effort of the British."
Not always has one been up to the task, or not always has one arrived in time to prevent the outrage. Ultimately, the English architectural legacy was to suffer more at the hand of man than by the work of time. Montgomery-Massingberd estimates that, between 1875 and 1975, nearly a thousand great country houses fell in Great Britain. As for the cities, the post-war reconstruction efforts—Sheffield, Coventry, London itself—have earned the consideration of "orgy of vandalism." In criticizing the housing policy of the premier—and former minister of the department—Harold Macmillan, Alan Clark quotes his comment verbatim: "Only dying countries try to maintain the symbols of the past." With such premises, the corollary was clear: the gradual replacement of architectural heritage by buildings "so sinister that their only saving defect is their rapid capacity to degrade." It was 1987 when Prince Charles stepped forward and dared to denounce it. "Something must be conceded to the Luftwaffe: by destroying our buildings"—he commented—"at least they didn't replace them with something worse than the rubble."
Anyone who enjoys the pinnacles of oratory would do well to prepare a good drink and plug into the architectural speeches of Prince Charles of England. Rarely did a royal take so many liberties; rarely did he say things with so much sense, whether we believe them or not. It would seem that the prince has taken his best darts from Tom Wolfe and his derision—Who's Afraid of the Fierce Bauhaus?—of architectural modernity. Thus, the Birmingham Central Library—of a brutalist, massive style—seems to him "a place to incinerate books, not to preserve them"; as for the extension of the British Library, he painfully hit the mark by comparing it to a police academy.
With plans to build around St. Paul's Cathedral, he would show no greater mercy: they were "buildings so mediocre that we can only remember them for the frustration they cause us." Since, back in 1984, he defined an expansion plan for the National Gallery as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend," every year there are volunteers to award the "Carbuncle" award to the most ostentatiously ugly building in the islands.
Perhaps the important thing about the princely words was not humor, but humor —undoubtedly— served him to undermine the megalomania of so many architectural narcissists who could understand houses as "machines for living," but never as spaces for human dignity. Of course, when the prince censored "the integral ugliness and mediocrity of the buildings (...) and residential complexes, not to mention the horror and desolation of so many urban expansions," architects were quick to retort. Charles of England —they said— should correct his aim and shoot rather at developers, legislators, and municipal officials.
The prince, however, could argue his position —and he has done so again and again, forcefully—. For him, it is a certain professorial establishment that, "in the fifties and sixties," imposes its "cultural agenda." In theoretical terms, it was about raising a "new architecture" suitable for post-war needs and capable of reflecting "the spirit of the times" —a time of technologies and progress— through "novel ideas" and "revolutionary building materials." In practical terms, what was generated was rather a mandarinat that, with hardly any restrictions, could afford, with a certain despotic abuse of reason, to enthrone its ideas without the slightest sensitivity to an obvious fact: what people want their home and their neighborhood to be. The final result? Prince Charles of England sees it as unflattering: "Senseless destruction in the name of progress (...) and the proliferation of Frankensteinian monsters, empty of character, alien and unloved by all, except by the professors who have devised them in their laboratories."
As a final coda, there remains—for Prince Charles of England—the lament. The deploration of an architecture that denies the past—"when a man loses the past, he loses his soul"—and the environment. The cry for the arrogance of having abstracted from attention to climate, to local materials, to the principles of always, to everything that underpinned "a sense of belonging and order" in building. The pain for so much destroyed beauty. And the discomfort of having to live not as one wants, but as some gentlemen, from their plans, decide one has to live. Curiously, post-war British architecture—almost without exception—was only capable of deteriorating, not of aging.
More witty or more serious, if Prince Charles of England had stuck to architectural criticism, he could well have earned the accusation of being inconsistent. Yes, with his foundations and his books, he has not ceased to explain his positions and promote good practices. However, it was the Poundbury project that ended up establishing his authority: it was, since the early nineties, about drawing an urban extension in Dorchester, with the extra responsibility of respecting the forms typical of the country novelized by Thomas Hardy. It was something—they said—doomed to failure. But it was also the expected alibi to apply the prince's ideas in vivo: human scales, with hardly any signage noise, controlled heights, community spaces, a convivial mix of housing and commerce, ecological concern, and an eclectic style that did not lose sight of classicism.
Here too there are results. Today, the Poundbury built by Leon Krier is—like Seaside in Florida—a paragon of "new urbanism" and, above all, a model of residential success: note that, if it already has more than a thousand homes, in just a few years there will be more than double. There is nothing there that contradicts the quality of life, the beauty. When celebrating the first twenty years of the town with a walk, a reflection escaped the prince: "After all, perhaps it was worth being stubborn."