5 NOVEMBER 1988, Page 5

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A VISION OF BRITAIN

The response of architects to 'A Vision of Britain', the television programme made by the Prince of Wales, has revealed how isolated and embattled the profession has become. Past and future presidents of the RIBA complain that he is merely express- ing the views of ordinary people; knighted architects and Gold Medal winners threaten to give back their gongs; but it is clear that they and not he are out of touch. Of all the arts, architecture has the most profound effect on the lives of ordinary people, which is why judgments must never be left exclusively to members of the profession. The popular response to the Prince's programme has been overwhel- mingly in his favour, which suggests not that he is acting inconsistently and dab- bling in matters beyond his competence but that he has interested himself in matters of legitimate public concern.

In fact, the architects have very little to complain about: so used are they to being criticised that they rush to the defence of `modern architecture' by instinct. Not only has the Prince of Wales done more to encourage popular interest in architectural affairs than any public relations agency hired by the RIBA could have achieved, he has also praised as well as criticised the current work of the profession. Indeed, it is absurd to suggest that there is any longer such a thing as a single coherent 'modern architecture' which is under attack an the tired old 'avant-garde' arguments about the merits of modernism being eventually appreciated clearly no longer hold. There is now a chance that architecture can again become as close to reflecting the aspira- tions and expectations of ordinary people as it always was in the past and that the post-war experiments in mass housing, urban renewal and prefabrication can be seen as the product of a uniquely disastrous period that the architectural profession would do well now to distance itself from, The Prince of Wales fully recognises that British architecture has greatly improved in quality in recent years and he is anxious to make sure that the same mistakes are not made again, that modern architecture should become more human, harmonious and sympathetically detailed. He bel;-,ves, rightly, that architecture must be rool....d in past experience, in tradition, in nature, in the character of the land and the pattern of the town as well as in ideal proportion and geometry. In this, he echoes Ruskin and Morris. He also speaks for the British people who have suffered too much from an arrogant profession in recent years, a profession which turned its back on the past and has yet to reform architectural schools so that they are able to educate students who can respond to the challenge the Prince has thrown down. Architecture may indeed have improved in recent years, but only in response to the public's rejec- tion of the old utopian and arid dogmas. If the Prince of Wales seems to reflect a blinkered popular prejudice in his dismis- sal of such good, if unfashionable, recent buildings as the National Theatre — for, as in any art, there has always been great architecture which is difficult to under- stand — he went well beyond his personal taste for a tame classicism in his intelligent praise of the work of such diverse and good architects as William Whitfield, Edward Cullinan and Michael Hopkins — the architect of the new semi-high tech stand at Lords. By admiring such buildings, as he should, the Prince of Wales cleverly took the wind out of the sails of his habitual critics.

The most significant aspect of the Prince's 'Vision of Britain' concerned not architecture but planning, that is, the control of building activity. When he asked Mr Cesar Pelli, the American architect of the 800-foot American skyscraper prop- osed for Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, `Why does it have to be quite so tall?', it was a question we might all ask. The immediate answer is that Docklands is exempt from conventional planning con- trol. Should it be? To an extent, architects are both pawns and victims as well as creatures of fashion. We get the architects

`I'm taking steroids this season.'

and the developers we deserve: both per- form within the constraints imposed by society. In the recent past, those con- straints have been planning controls and the listed building system: legitimate checks on the actitivies of architects cre- ated by a democratic society in response to the disastrous post-war rebuilding of Bri- tain. Prince Charles does not like tall buildings. More important, he feels that the once famous skyline of Wren's City of London has been needlessly ruined in the last two decades. Many will agree with him. The forces that have changed London are not beyond the control of our society and the Prince was right to observe that such destructiveness would not have been permitted in Paris or Rome. It was intelli- gent, therefore, to point to Siena, where planning controls have existed for seven centuries and are popular. In this country, because of recent experience, 'planning' is a pejorative term. When the Prince spoke of, 'a sort of Ten Commandments with sensible and widely agreed rules', he was really talking about a Building Code of regulations such as governed the varied, socially stratified but harmonious develop- ment of Georgian Bath or Dublin.

It was the abandonment, or alteration, of such codes that encouraged the post-war experiments in planning. A new national Building Code might reimpose the regula- tions governing the width of streets and the height of buildings. It would also control the use of building materials and the provision of open spaces and public ameni- ties. It would give guidance on the size and disposition of building plots, so harnessing the sort of commercial pressures which currently allow the replacement of low- rent housing — vital in any civilised city by office accommodation. This is what intelligent planning ought to mean. Such a code would not at all concern itself with style and need not inhibit the true creativity of architects. If architects could recognise that the Prince of Wales is not anti- architecture but in favour of a truly popu- lar, organic, responsible and varied mod- ern architecture, that his vision of Britain involves them as well, then the absurb gulf between the architectural profession and the public might be again bridged.