Well, our dear friend Ricky Burdett (with whom I have been travelling around the world studying cities with his Urban Age Program, q.v., my write-up of the UA Mumbai Conference in 2007 [ www.columbia.edu/~rr322/UA-Mumbai.htm ] for a description of Ricky and the Urban Age program), has taken on Prince Charles!

In a letter to the Times of London, Ricky (along with co-signers that include architects Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, and David Adaye) has taken the prince to task for going behind the scenes and using his influence to scuttle the plans for a condominium complex at the former Chelsea Barracks. The letter details the extensive, open, public process the Richard Rogers design for the project has gone through; and it points out that, “Rogers and his team have played their part in engaging with the democratic process.” The letter concludes,

If the prince wants to comment on the design of this, or any other, project, we urge him to do so through the established planning consultation process. Rather than use his privileged position to intervene in one of the most significant residential projects likely to be built in London in the next five years, he should engage in an open and transparent debate.

It is believed that Prince Charles, who for decades has been an arch opponent of modern architecture, is lobbying for a design by Quinlan Terry, a favorite of his, who has proposed a plan the mimic’s the traditional style of Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Hospital, which is adjacent to the project. Although he has shown wise restraint in not having made this point in the current brouhaha, Deyan Sudjic (another signatory to the letter who is Director of the Design Museum in London and a member of the Urban Age team) wrote an important book (The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--and Their Architects--Shape the World), in which he pointed out how, in their quest for expression of their personal power, many of the most powerful figures behind the building of buildings (e.g., Hitler, Mussolini) showed a marked propensity for using mediocre architects. It is very likely that my readers have never heard the name Quinlan Terry, who has been described by others as “a deeply conventional architect who reacts against the Modernist style and its variants”; and this fact stands in incredibly sharp contrast to the names of Richard Rogers and the architects who were signatories to the letter (six of whom are Pritzker Prize winners). Deyan was quoted today as saying, “This is not really about a style, or an argument about how buildings look, but how we go about things.”

It has been suggested that in his quest to undo the results that the democratic process has produced, Charles has been using his special relationship with the Qatari emir whose family's wealth is helping to bankroll the project. His potential to influence the Westminster City Council, who will be voting soon on the plans, is also naturally at issue.

The complete letter (which was also signed by Nick Serota, who was a commissioner from 1999-2006 on the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, and is the Director of the Tate in London) is reprinted below.

In the meantime, the letter has created quite a stir in the UK. The Sunday Times not only printed it, they ran a subtly hostile article by Richard Brooks about it on the front page of yesterday’s edition (property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/article6122786.ece, reprinted in full below for your convenience) and an openly hostile editorial (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6122549.ece, again, reprinted below for your convenience). Meanwhile, today’s Guardian carried a positive article by Peter Walker (www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/20/prince-charles-planning-interference, reprinted below) and an openly positive editorial (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/20/prince-charles-richard-rogers-chelsea, reprinted below)

Personally, I am enormously proud of the stand Ricky has taken. I shall keep you posted about developments.

Letter, printed in The Sunday Times, April 19, 2009

THE Prince of Wales’s intervention over the design of the former Chelsea Barracks site deserves more reasoned comment. It is essential in a modern democracy that private comments and behind-the-scenes lobbying by the prince should not be used to skew the course of an open and democratic planning process that is under way.

Proposals by Richard Rogers’s practice for the developers Qatari Diar were recently submitted for planning to Westminster city council. The scheme has been adapted and changed in response to comments from Westminster’s planning officers and extensive local consultation. Statutory bodies such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Greater London Authority have also been consulted. Westminster’s planning committee will meet engage in an open and shortly to deliver its verdict. Its members should be left alone to decide whether the Rogers scheme is a fitting 21st-century addition to the fabric of London. The developers have chosen carefully in selecting the best architect for the sensitive project. Rogers and his team have played their part in engaging with the democratic process. The prince and his advisers should do the same. The process should be allowed to take its course; otherwise we risk condemning this critical site to years as an urban blight.

Rather than use his privileged position to intervene in one of the most significant residential projects likely to be built in London in the next five years, he should engage in an open and transparent debate.

Lord Foster, Foster and Partners, London, Pritzker Prize 1999
Zaha Hadid, Zaha Hadid Architects, London, Pritzker Prize 2004
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Pritzker Prize 2001
Jean Nouvel, Jean Nouvel Architectes, Paris, Pritzker Prize 2008
Renzo Piano, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa, Pritzker Prize 1998
Frank Gehry, Gehry Partners, Los Angeles, Pritzker Prize 1989
Sir Nicholas Serota, Commissioner, CABE 1999-2006
Richard Burdett, London School of Economics
David Adjaye, Adjaye Associates, London
Deyan Sudjic, Director, Design Museum, London

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Prince Charles told: don't interfere on planning decisions

Leading architects complain that prince abuses position to 'skew' planning decisions

by Peter Walker, The Guardian, Monday 20 April 2009

Almost exactly 25 years after Prince Charles began his personal battle against modern architecture, condemning a planned - and swiftly abandoned - new wing to the National Gallery as a "monstrous carbuncle", he has received his sternest ticking-off yet from the profession, with some of the world's leading architects warning that he is abusing his position to unfairly influence planning decisions.

The prince's private efforts to scupper a development of glass and steel housing blocks by Richard Rogers' practice at the site of the former Chelsea Barracks in west London amounts to an attempt to "skew the course" of an open planning process already under way, the architects, including Lord Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid from the UK, as well as Frank Gehry, who created Bilbao's Guggenheim museum, wrote in a letter.

Such interference undermined developers' confidence in the UK's planning system and might even deter some from investing in London, one of the other signatories, a leading urban planning expert, Professor Richard Burdett, warned.

"We have here a very established, very clear, open and democratic process, with all its strengths and weaknesses," said Burdett, who headed the Venice architecture biennale on cities in 2006. "We know how it works. It has the possibility of an appeal and then the possibility of a public inquiry. The fact that suddenly a voice which is somehow unequal comes into it does create a risk of destabilisation.

"In this delicate moment of post-credit crunch economic frailty, developers could feel that their money is at risk, or made more at risk, by powers that are not very clear. We could end up in a situation where people end up saying, 'Why invest here?'"

The 10 senders of the letter to yesterday's Sunday Times, among them six winners of the Pritzker award, often viewed as architecture's equivalent of a Nobel prize, were prompted to act after it was reported that Charles had written privately to the head of a firm owned by Qatar's royal family which bought the 5.2-hectare site for more than £950m last year.

It is understood that the prince called Rogers' proposed flats, to be located opposite Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Hospital, "unsympathetic". Charles is believed to favour an alternative design by the architect Quinlan Terry, which mimics Wren's building and has been condemned by critics as a weak pastiche. Backers of the Rogers design also point out that about half the 552 units in his scheme would comprise affordable housing.

Charles's "private comments and behind-the-scenes lobbying" were anomalous in a modern, democratic system, said the letter writers, who also included Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss duo whose practice turned the former Bankside power station into the Tate Modern, and Italy's Renzo Piano, the co-designer with Rogers of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Rogers' proposals for the Chelsea site had already been adapted following local objections and were now in the hands of Westminster council planners, they noted. "If the prince wants to comment on the design of this, or any other, project, we urge him to do so through the established planning consultation process. Rather than use his privileged position to intervene in one of the most significant residential projects likely to be built in London in the next five years, he should engage in an open and transparent debate."

"This is not really about a style, or an argument about how buildings look, but how we go about things," said Deyan Sudjic, the director of the Design Museum in London, who also signed the letter. "What's slightly depressing is that this is kind of an old argument which began 25 years ago in quite a similar way, with the Prince of Wales' no doubt quite well-intentioned attempt to interfere with a process which does have certain clearly laid-out legal steps. This is an unaccountable additional layer to that process."

While Charles's views on modern architecture have remained trenchant and regularly aired, in recent years he has repaired some bridges with the profession. Next month, he is due to present a lecture marking the 175th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

"I think it's all come as a bit of a surprise," said Sudjic. "With the Prince of Wales due to be addressing Riba shortly, there was a sense that sweetness and light had broken out and that there wasn't quite the stylistic polarisation that there had been. Now it seems to be the prince, again, targeting a particular architect in a way which is returning to the way that he behaved previously."

A day after Riba announced that Charles was to make his address, the organisation's president, Sunand Prasad, criticised the prince's intervention, saying he should "allow the properly constituted and conducted planning process to take place unhindered".

A spokeswoman for the prince's Clarence House office said she had no comment about "a private letter that may or may not have been sent".

Charles v the architects

Prince Charles's views on modern architecture are well known. In May 1984, he used a speech marking the 150th anniversary of Riba to lambast the National Gallery's planned extension. The design was dropped. Charles also agitated successfully against a modern scheme devised by Rogers for Paternoster Square adjoining St Paul's Cathedral in London. The prince has for some years largely avoided criticising specific buildings still at the planning stage, although this rarely stopped him airing displeasure at existing buildings or the modern architectural establishment in general - in February last year he labelled a highly praised new university lecture hall in Essex "a dustbin". The prince's own foray into urban design, Poundbury in Dorset, has been received with equal sniffiness by many architects. The village's new mock-Classical fire station was described by one critic as "the Parthenon meets Brookside". The paradox of his latest intervention is that when Wren built the Royal Hospital in the 1680s it was modelled on the then new Hôpital des Invalides in Paris, and was thus deemed modern itself

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Prince Charles: Shut up or step down

Editorial, The Guardian, Monday 20 April 2009

The Prince of Wales is not alone in finding that Richard Rogers's steel-and-glass design for the Chelsea Barracks site is not to his liking. But among the objectors, Charles is unique in possessing a way-in with the Qatari emir whose family's wealth is helping to bankroll the project. He is trying to use it to scupper the scheme, and have it replaced with one that is in keeping with royal tastes - a display of arrogant contempt for due planning process which raises new questions about whether he could ever be a suitable king.

The point here is not the merits of the prince's argument, even though there are important objections to the rival proposal by Quinlan Terry, an architect blessed with princely favour. Some charge that it would produce a museum piece which blithely ignores more than a century of architectural and technical progress; others object that it relegates the social housing element of the Rogers plan to outbuildings. None of this is decisive, however, because whether the Terry or Rogers designs are preferred comes down in the end to individual aesthetic judgment. No, the real point is that Charles is seeking to circumvent the proper procedure for settling the matter by exploiting privilege that he enjoys purely through fluke of birth.

As a whole host of the planet's top architects explained in a letter to yesterday's Sunday Times, the Rogers proposal has been subjected to prolonged and open consultation, and been refined in light of the views of local people and - among other bodies - the Greater London authority. As Westminster council's planning committee prepares to make the final decision, it is an outrage that elected officials are being second-guessed by a hidden monarchical hand.

Charles's correspondence with the Qatari sovereign wealth fund was private, but an attempt to wield public power nonetheless. It is imperative that such dealings are subjected to the same freedom of information obligations as other forms of public authority. Even if done out in the open, however, royal embroilment in divisive rows is incompatible with the dubious ideal of a constitutional monarchy. It falls to the prince to shut up - or step down.

The days when Prince Charles branded an extension to the National Gallery "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a friend" have long passed, and he has tended more recently to restrict himself to bemoaning buildings that are already built - seeming to recognise that there is a big difference between a monarch-to-be expressing his tastes and seeking to affect public policy. He must understand that the exploitation of regal power on issues of public controversy is itself a monstrous carbuncle - on the face of democracy.

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Top architects attack Prince Charles — again

Richard Brooks, From The Sunday Times, April 19, 2009

THE Prince of Wales has been criticised by some of the world’s leading architects for “using his privileged position” to intervene in the design of a controversial luxury development in one of the most attractive parts of London.

The architects, who include five winners of the Pritzker prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel prize, complain that Charles has “skewed” the democratic process by using his royal connections in an attempt to stop modernist plans for the former Chelsea Barracks.

Last week The Sunday Times disclosed that the prince had been successful in persuading the Qatari royal family, who own the site, to consider having more traditional brick and stone buildings for the development at the expense of the glass and steel proposals submitted by Lord Rogers, the project’s architect.

The prince, no stranger to clashes with the architectural establishment, argues that the proposed buildings would look inappropriate adjacent to the Royal hospital, Chelsea, designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

The attack on the prince, who is known for his traditional views on architecture, comes in a letter to today’s Sunday Times. It is signed by, among others, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Lord Foster, Zaha Hadid, Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry, who are leading figures in their field. Among their works are the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics, the Gherkin and Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

“If the prince wants to comment on the design of this or any other project we urge him to do so through the established planning consultation process,” they write.

“It is essential in a modern democracy that private comments and behind-the-scenes lobbying by the prince should not be used to skew the course of an open and democratic planning process that is currently under way.”

They point out that Westminster city council has already adapted and changed the project’s design in response to comments from planning officers and extensive local consultation, and that statutory bodies such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), which oversees architecture and design on behalf of the government, have also been consulted.

“Westminster’s planning committee will meet shortly to deliver its verdict,” they continue. “Its members should be left alone to decide whether the Rogers scheme is a fitting 21st-century addition to the fabric of London.

“The developers have chosen carefully in selecting the best architect for the sensitive project. Rogers and his team have played their part in the democratic process. The prince and his advisers should do the same.”

Speaking yesterday, another signatory to the letter, Richard Burdett, the architect and academic, added his personal criticism of Charles. “[The prince] is basically saying that Rogers should be fired,” said Burdett, who is also overseeing designs for the London 2012 Olympics. “Yet Rogers, of all people, has been about making city centres liveable. Charles, who is himself unelected, has also written a letter [to the Qataris] which is all about history rather than about a modern design in keeping with a developing city and the neighbourhood.”

Charles seems to have a particular dislike of designs by Rogers, who is a Companion of Honour, an award granted by the Queen. Rogers was one of the architects who put in proposals for the extension for the National Gallery in 1984, which were criticised by the prince. He famously called one of the plans “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend”. He also objected to Rogers’s ideas to redevelop Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s Cathedral.

The prince wants his favourite architect Quinlan Terry, who is noted for neo-classical design, to take over the Chelsea project.

Clarence House declined to comment.

Built by the prince’s opponents

— Lord Foster’s City Hall, housing the London mayor, was nicknamed “the glass testicle”. Boris Johnson rechristened it “the onion”.

— Foster’s National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham, opened in 1996, has been called “excruciatingly dismal” by critics.

— Heathrow’s terminal 5, designed by Lord Rogers, was called “a disaster” after baggage-handling chaos last year.

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A Prince who just happens to be right

Editorial, From The Sunday Times, April 19, 2009

The Prince of Wales is no stranger to controversy when it comes to architecture and he has fought some bloody battles over the years. But he has always chosen his ground carefully and the conflicts have been few and far between. Most famous was the “monstrous carbuncle” extension to the National Gallery in 1984 and the Paternoster development alongside St Paul’s Cathedral. Because of his clout, he more or less won both of them. But for some years he has lain low, content to push ahead with his Poundbury village in Dorset and his Prince’s Foundation, which designs traditional housing developments.

Thus his intervention in the scheme at Chelsea Barracks is significant. He regards the Lord Rogers design as inappropriate (no doubt a euphemism for “hideous”) for a site alongside Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal hospital. He would clearly prefer a neo-classical development by Quinlan Terry, his favoured architect.

His involvement has infuriated the architectural establishment, as can be seen on our letters page today. Never before has a group of such distinguished international architects come together to condemn the prince for using his position to intervene in what they call “one of the most significant residential projects likely to be built in London in the next five years”. These are among the finest architects working today, who have produced such marvels as the Gherkin (Lord Foster) and Tate Modern (Herzog & de Meuron). Lord Rogers created the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s building in London. But they are not infallible. Lord Rogers also gave us the undistinguished terminal 5 at Heathrow and Lord Foster the unsightly National Sea Life centre in Birmingham and the mayor’s office on the Thames opposite the Tower of London, described by a former mayor as a “glass testicle”.

Their judgment can be questioned, as can that of all those developers throwing up lacklustre and ugly buildings in our cities. Locals complain they have little influence in the planning process, which is frequently opaque.

That the prince is using his position is not in doubt and some would regard this as trying to subvert the planning process by stealth. But this is an occasion when he happens to be right. It could equally be said that he should not have intervened in the National Gallery and Paternoster developments, even though the capital ended up with better buildings alongside national treasures. Faced by greedy developers and an arrogant architectural establishment that despises classical design, it requires the occasional influential voice to stand up to them. Let us hope that on this occasion his voice prevails and London ends up with a development to rival that of Wren.

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