Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower in West London
Prince Charles’ planned contribution to a debate at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has a caused a predictable stir this week. A number of the institute’s prominent members are planning to boycott the event in protest at the Prince’s ‘undemocratic’ meddling in the progress of British architecture.
The battlelines are well established in this dispute: on one side the vast majority of architects , schooled to varying degrees in the aesthetics of modernism, post-modernism or post-post-modernism, and on the other the heir to the throne pleading the case for ‘elegance’ and a vague, hazily imagined sense of tradition.
As our resident philosopher and podcaster Nigel Warburton points out on his blog, the same debate blighted the career of Erno Goldfinger (creator of the majestic Trellick Tower, above) in the 1950s. Ian Fleming hated Goldfinger’s work so much he immortalised him as James Bond’s arch villain.
According to Warburton, the ‘Prince Charles fallacy’ is ‘the misguided notion that the only buildings that should be allowed to be built are those that look more less like the buildings that are already in the area’ - that buildings should be designed not according to their use, but according to the appearance of nearby buildings.
Is the heir to the throne right to still be campaigning against ‘modern’ architecture? Or are architects themselves on weak ground when they appeal against ‘intervening in the democratic process of planning applications’? Shouldn’t this debate have moved a little further on in the last 25 years?
Let us know your views in the comments below- and take a listen to Nigel’s latest podcast on the virtue of thrift in politics (also downloadable on itunes and at the right of this screen).
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There is quite enough disharmony in the world without
arrogant half-demented architects ( who perhaps weren’t allowed to suck their thumbs as children )erecting carbuncles that stick out like sore thumbs
As a child in the realm of becoming ( before the left liquidised our borders ), the main enemies were the National Front and Apartheid ( Oh , how we marched )
Today, they are Roundheads ( the naked emperors of the New Labour project – thirty-five thousand children taken into care since Baby Peter – count them ), and the Damien Hursts of architecture
such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Piers Gough
( Art ? Oh, how we laugh ) whose inhuman buildings insult the earth they are inflicted upon , let alone the aesthetic sensibilities of Everyman ( not just our divinely human and very much beloved Prince of Wales ) wherever the Pride’s purged local authorities, no-win no-fee lawyers, and media are morally corrupt enough to promote them
Please, God, the three cheers for The Telegraph
( Prospect – where the bleep were YOU ? ? )
continue their hit series by publishing next the expense claims of local councils across the UK
This said, I personally , was too delighted to
learn that at least some of my lolly had been wisely invested in English heritage by the fine fellows
who allegedly claimed for Moat and Chandelier maintenance
Trellick Tower? Majestic? It looks like a giant bloody prison block! It’s iconic, certainly, but it’s as ugly as sin.
Maybe there should be a return to reading Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”. Similar building controversy (The what is appropriate “good” architecture) is the story line used to drive the Objectivist philosophy.