News From The Principality
Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, the red conservative rag, has a story which may be of interest to Amcon readers. The Prince of Wales, Charles U.K, has just got himself into another spat with Lord Rogers and the architecture community. This time their rage may be justifiable.
Lord Rogers had just designed a one billion pound plan for the redevelopment of the old Chelsea Barracks. The Emir of Quatar ,who owns the plot, was going to pick up the tab for the most expensive building project ever in the UK which would have provided much needed jobs for our beleaguered building industry: in the last year, architects claiming unemployment benefit have risen from 150 to 1290 persons. In the current climate it would have certainly been passed by the planning authorities, however hideous it may be.
Prince Charles, realising that the case of the action group against the project would not be won by open debate in the UK, has written to the prime minister of Quatar, a cousin of the Emir, to complain, and hit the jackpot. The Emir has agreed to withdraw the plan, and to include the Prince’s Foundation for the Built environment in plans for a future design. Thus, for another year, the traffic of central London will not be blocked up with happy builder’s vans trundling back and forth, and 1290 architects will have to remain on the dole. I am interested in what American Conservatives may make of this story. (a) are such parochial uk matters of no interest (b) does it offend the American Republican spirit to have two princes arranging matters of public interest through private letters or (c) does the Thoreauan principle of “one man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one” apply?
Huzzah for the soggy Prince for once. The last thing anyone needs is another damn Modernist piece of crap. Can we get back to designing buildings with some actual classical aesthetics rather than Brutalist chic? PJ O’Rourke had it right, it is a bad idea to stack poor people who drink.
…Pick “a” or “b” or “c”.
Put me down for a “d”. You and I are at nearly opposite ends. But, nearly everything you say is interesting.
I mean, really, don’t those of us (male, hetero) who miss the self-satisfied little asian gal in the middle of the night, from the CNN of 20 yrs ago, regret MSM selling it’s soul?
The Rupert Murdochs (Fox) don’t seem to think the US average guy wants to hear it, just because Christiane Amanpour (CNN) makes us puke, as she blames the US and Christians for the world’s ills. Just because the AP makes you want to stick your finger down the throat of your soul, just for having accidently glanced at it.
I WANT a newspaper-level scattering of what is current globally, and I want an occasional deep-think article in a mag like TAC, and in between I want to see what people care about on this blog, particularly those with a global perspective, such as yourself. (While reserving the right to disagree with what is “obvious” to others, without some corporate sneering backwash).
What is of little use to me is the tabloid pap, domestically, such as: Palin is fat and dumb, Rush is fat and dumb, people who listen to FOX or the GOP are fat and dumb, I hate conservative – did I mention I’m pretending to be conservative today? (I can go to CNN Headline News and listen to Lou Dobbs, when I’m in the mood for that stuff).
Intelligent people such as yourself, are a welcome opposite to the bad example I just mentioned.
Permitting A.N. Wilson to speak for me (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1193563/Yes-lets-inquiry–modernists-ruined-cities.html), I pick c — except that, given the quotation from an anonymous resident in Wilson’s piece (One resident said: ‘We never supported the Rogers plans, which were presented to us as a done deal after no more than the most perfunctory consultation.’), I wonder if Charles wasn’t, in fact, speaking for some “silent majority” whom the Modernist Messianics ignored in the name of their perception of the greater good.
When I see story of how a development is going to create lots of jobs and have economic benefit, it just requires “redeveloping” a community, I always think of GM’s monstrosity Cadillac plant in Detroit in the early 80′s that destroyed the Poletown neighborhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poletown.) That turned out to not produce anything like the economic benefit promised. Of course, the community got destroyed as promised.
I think the Poletowners could’ve used the Prince.
And, BTW, my ancestors shot at yours in Massachusetts, so my republicanism is pretty solid.
As a long time American reader of the Spectator, The Times, the Telegraph, the Salisbury Review etc., I am always interested in news from the Mother Country. Some of the best conservative thought influencing our right has always come from Britain. The best writing still does.
In this case, I think the Prince is doing his countrymen a service. I must be one of the few Americans to have bought his book Building Classical. His call for a humane architecture gets a lot of undeserved abuse in my view.
The problem with the Royals of Europe is that they have no real jobs. It’s a shame they have no constitutional role in, for instance, defending the cultural and heritage rights of their subjects. Imagine highly educated non-political ombudsmen interposing themselves between the Eurocrats and ordinary people of Europe! Let my people make cheese, indeed.
Dear Barney, Thankyou for your compliments, though I could not make head nor tail of threequarters of your comment. Maybe one day I will.WRW who on earth is BTW? Bloody Transatlantic Woofta?
Though I sympathise with the prince’s desire to leave his mark on the world, his attempt at town planning in Poundbury Dorset is dire. It is a lifeless village with a lack of greenery and nature. Stones have merely replaced concrete. The best urban environments are either created higgledypiggledy, like New York, or have aquired higgledypiggeldiness over the centuries like Rome.
Maybe the Prince has no talent for planning, but if he has a talent for preventing ugly plans from reaching fruition, then he should by all means be encouraged to put it to good use.
In a perfect world, the people in the surrounding area would be empowered to speak and exercise their veto on especially undesirable additions to the views from their front porches, but we live in an imperfect world where property rights are trampled on, and if it takes a prince to prevent certain tramplings, then it’s a good thing the English have one handy.
Septimus, BTW is American shorthand for By The Way. As in, BTW, Rome didn’t become higgledypiggledy by accretion. Even the planning genius of the Romans was not up to the job of straightening out the road plan of the Latin villages that became the imperial city. The many sacred sites and temples could never be moved, so Rome became an interesting city despite the Romans.
Thankyou Thomas
Three cheers for the Prince! London has some of the ugliest postwar architecture in Europe, outdoing even Brussels. I well remember boozing with the Royal Hospital pensioners in the seedy pubs near the Chelsea Barracks back in the seventies. The thought of some glittering monstrosity rising above the Wren Royal Hospital was and is appalling. If architects are unemployed it is because they have created so much ugliness. All new public buildings in London (and everywhere else) should be required to come out of Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture, no exceptions.
[...] 19, 2009 I have to second Dreher and Waugh on this one; Prince Charles’s opposition to Chelsea Barracks, if not entirely democratic, is [...]
[...] UPDATE: Septimus Waugh in TAC [...]
When faced with the down escalator of taste generally, what is wrong with an appeal such as the Prince makes, to neo-classicism? We need to mine our past rather than continue to create soulless monstrosities for novelties sake.
The tin god of novelty was enshrined in architecture when we accepted the proposition that we needed to ape advances in the sciences in the realm of art. There is no progress in art, only difference. Bauhaus was an interesting expression of early twentieth century machine worship. As a non-machine, I say let’s have less of it and its Teutonic progeny.
Thomas, while I am all for the prince as a critic of modernity, I do not love neoclassicism when it is let loose on town planning. Places like Poundbury and Bath are as mechanistic and soulless as Milton Keynes. Give us the serendipity of Venice or even Bristol any day. It should be a rule that no architect may be let loose on more than one street at a time.
Septimus, good rule. I didn’t mean to endorse town planning writ-large or a blind adherance to neoclassical architecture. I wasn’t clear in my enthusiasm. The severity of style left to us post-Bau Haus, coupled with governmental penny pinching, has created an inhuman urban landscape.
I just wish that architects would mine the past for inspiration rather than resort to inflicting buildings on the rest of us that resemble either air conditioners or 1st year art student sculptures.