12 July 1998
Source: Hardcopy The New Yorker, July 13, 1998, pp. 52-59
__________________________________Architecture__________________________________ |
LETTER FROM LONDON
Prince Charles's campaign for a traditional architecture is a shambles, and in London the modernists reign.
BY PAUL GOLDBERGER
LAST week, Queen Elizabeth presided at the dedication ceremony of the new British Library, a sprawling, eight-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar pile of brick and concrete within sight of St. Pancras Station. In a speech she called the building "remarkable" and "a labor of love." The Queen was emphatically not accompanied by the Prince of Wales, whose opinion of the building had already been expressed, in somewhat less diplomatic language than his mother's. The British Library, Prince Charles said in 1988, would be "a dim collection of brick sheds groping for some symbolic significance" and would resemble "an academy for secret police." That royal excoriation was so harsh that the library's architect, Colin St. John Wilson, later claimed that it had led to the demise of his practice.
Until very recently, the Prince has rarely passed up an opportunity to comment on a new building. His attempt to direct the course of British architecture toward more traditional designs has been the major project of his adult life, and no member of the Royal Family has been as outspoken on any subject as Charles has been in his jihad against modern architecture. Lately, however, the Prince has been more or less silent on the subject. He has offered a few remarks in defense of Poundbury, a quaint neo-traditional village that he commissioned in Dorset, but the sweeping pleas to reject modernism and bring back classical architecture have stopped. Charles's stoic silence about the new library, a banal and wildly unpopular building that even many modernists dislike, does not mean that he has changed his views. But he has evidently come to believe that his architectural crusade has interfered with his project of turning himself into the kind of heir to the throne that the British public seems to crave. And, indeed, Charles is no longer seen as an indifferent father and an amiable dingbat who talks to carrots. Rather, he is now spoken of in the respectful tones befitting a future king.
THE refurbishing of Charles's public persona is only part of the story. The reality is that the Prince's vision of Britain--equal parts Christopher Wren and Ralph Lauren--has been defeated, overwhelmed by a wave of sleekness that has given London more glass and stainless steel than New York and fresher architecture than Paris. Modernists dominate the British architecture world today as never before. Richard Rogers, the sixty-four-year-old architect who, in the late nineteen-eighties, led the opposition to the Prince, is now Lord Rogers, and he and his fellow-modernist Norman Foster, now Sir Norman, are the most powerful architects in the land.
The Prince declared war on modern architecture in 1984, in a speech in which he called a proposed addition to the National Gallery"a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend." With those words, he instantly became the world's most famous architecture critic, and a new age of British classicism seemed imminent, with him as its patron. With advisers like the classicist Leon Krier and the Financial Times critic Colin Amery at his side, Charles founded a school to teach classical architecture, started a magazine, wrote a book, produced a television special, commissioned Krier to design Poundbury, and watched with pleasure as plans for modern commercial buildings in London were tossed out in favor of more traditional designs. The future of architecture in Britain seemed to belong to architects like Quinlan Terry, a stuffy classicist best known for an office building, along the Thames in Richmond, designed to look like a series of classical false fronts--a building the Prince called "an expression of harmony and proportion."
Modernists like Rogers and Foster decided to find work abroad. James Stirling, whose proposal in 1986 for an office building near the Bank of England had been described by the Prince as looking "like a 1930's wireless," did a lot of his work in Germany and the United States, and declared that if he won the commission to design the Getty Center, in Los Angeles--he was one of three finalists--he would immigrate to the United States.
But today Charles's magazine, Perspectives, is defunct. His school, the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture, has had four directors in six years, and has been denied accreditation by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The school's board now consists of lawyers and is run by Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, the solicitor who handled the divorce of Charles's longtime lover, Camilla Parker Bowles. Poundbury, partly built, is a theme park of a hundred and forty-two houses--pretty but of little significance beyond its connection to its royal squire. As far as Britain's architectural culture is concerned, the Prince is now under a kind of intellectual house arrest.
Meanwhile, the exiles have returned in triumph. Foster and Rogers now head an entire school of British modernists, which includes Nicholas Grimshaw, who designed the glass-roofed terminal for the Eurostar, the Chunnel train, at Waterloo Station; members of the firm Arup Associates; Michael Hopkins; Lifschutz Davidson; and David Chipperfield. Together they constitute the most cohesive and vibrant group of modernist architects in any country in the world. The work they are producing is very different from the Le Corbusier-inspired "new brutalism" of the previous generation of British modernists, a style typified by Denys Lasdun's National Theatre, on the Thames. The new work is brighter, lighter, more exuberant, enthralled by technology, and as sensual as it is spare. For the first time in decades, there is a clear British architectural style, and most of it is very good. But it is nothing like what the Prince of Wales, who tried harder to put architecture on the public agenda than any leader since Thomas Jefferson. intended it to be.
PRINCE CHARLES has no formal training in architecture, but his sincerity has never been in doubt. Big, harsh modern buildings offended his sensibilities, and he knew that the difference between living in a council high-rise and living in Kensington Palace was not only a matter of how much space you had. The problem, friends say, is that Charles is not particularly interested in the twentieth century. He is reportedly happiest at Highgrove, his eighteenth-century country house, and is made uncomfortable by cities, going to considerable lengths to avoid spending the night in London. Charles's architectural education, one of his friends has remarked, consisted of "looking out the window of a Rolls-Royce listening to his mother and grandmother saying, 'Isn't all that ugly?' "
In launching his architectural crusade, the Prince made an error in judgment. From the outset, he cast the issue of Britain's architectural future in moralistic terms, as an argument "between the inhuman and the human," he wrote in his book "A Vision of Britain." The more he sermonized, the more he sounded like a well-bred reactionary. Charles got people talking about architecture, but his solutions were vague and sentimental, and he had no coherent plan for making things better. And he failed to understand a basic historical fact about British architecture: it has always valued eccentricity. Most of the greatest British architects--Nicholas Hawksmoor, John Soane, William Butterfield, Edwin Lutyens--have broken rules, not followed them, and have developed highly personal ways of building. But here was the Prince saying that rules mattered more than ever, and were morally superior, too.
Stephen Bayley, a founding director of Sir Terence Conran's Design Museum, in London, recalls meeting with the Prince to invite him to give the dedication speech for the museum's opening, in 1989. "We went to St. James's Palace and showed him the model, and all he said was 'Mr. Bayley, but why does it have a flat roof?' "
Charles surrounded himself with people who shared his vision of Britain. Even so, several years into his campaign against modernism, schisms started to develop within his inner circle. Some of his advisers continued to argue that his crusade would bring him closer to the people, but others thought it was simply making him look stodgy. By the time the Labour Government took over last year, the anti-stodge camp was in the ascendancy. If Charles was ever going to convince the people that he had some of the contemporary touch that had made them love Diana, going on and on about how much he hated everything modern just wouldn't do.
"There have always been two conflicting issues--the agenda of the Prince of Wales and the agenda of the palace," an architectural historian who used to teach at the Prince's institute told me. The palace, he said, wants "to smooth the route to the throne and remove the Prince from any controversial activity. He ruffled so many feathers." (Another friend of the Prince said to me, "Put not your trust in princes-- they cannot run things, because they are run themselves.")
Now Charles is being advised by a group of people with no connection to architecture, image shapers who are said to be close to Camilla Parker Bowles. Since there seemed little chance of persuading Charles to moderate his views on architecture, these new courtiers have tried to shift him off the subject altogether. "He can no longer be the agent provocateur--he cannot be engaged in an intellectual battle with everyone else," Paul Finch, the editor of Architects' Journal, said to me. "They will not allow it.
WHEN Charles first took on the architectural establishment, it was difficult not to applaud him. Back then, most modern architecture in Britain was awful. New brutalism had been embraced with more enthusiasm in Britain than anywhere else, and London, for a while, seemed to be the world capital of concrete slabs. In Charles's second major speech on the subject, he declared that modern architects had done more damage to London than the Luftwaffe, and the British people cheered.
The Prince's populist affection for old-fashioned buildings turned out to be right at home in the Britain of Margaret Thatcher. Even though the business and real-estate communities were at odds with the Prince when it came to such big nineteen-eighties projects as the office complex at Canary Wharf, whose American-style skyscraper Thatcher loved and the Prince despised, those communities could easily agree with him about architectural tastes in private homes. What better way to celebrate the newly created wealth of the boom years than with a shiny new neoclassical villa? Charles's architecture crusade, excised of its moral fervor, became closely associated with Thatcherism, almost in spite of itself. Classical architecture felt rich, and in the eighties rich was good.
Sometimes more than just a conceptual connection bound Charles's crusade to Thatcherism. There was, for example, the reconstruction of Paternoster Square, a site adjacent to St. Paul's Cathedral occupied by a dreary set of office buildings from the sixties. In the eighties, a developer planned a new Paternoster Square, and invited six prominent modernist architects, including Richard Rogers, to submit schemes. Rogers's plan was reportedly the favorite, but the developer, worried that it wouldn't pass muster with Charles, chose a scheme by Arup Associates instead. Arup fared no better than Rogers; Charles's lack of enthusiasm led to the abandonment of the whole competition, and the decision was made to start all over again with an elaborate cluster of classical palazzi, intended to make Paternoster Square into a showpiece of London's new classical revival. That version, which was put together by a consortium of American, British, and Japanese developers and included buildings by John Simpson and the American classicists Allan Greenberg and Thomas Beeby, didn't get built, either. The project stumbled when it became obvious that the buildings, designed to please Charles, would be too expensive and were too awkwardly laid out to make sense as office space. It was an attempt"to produce seven masterpieces at the same moment--an impossible scenario," as one of the developers put it.
So the old Paternoster Square still stands, more desolate than ever, its empty concrete buildings facing a littered, windswept plaza. A few months ago, developers unveiled a new, more modest, more practical plan for the area. Even if the new project is built, it will do little to change the general view of Paternoster Square as a powerful emblem of how Prince Charles's architectural ideas have become increasingly irrelevant in the Britain of Tony Blair.
THE architect Richard Rogers has been the Prince's fiercest and most eloquent opponent. He was born in Italy into a family of English intellectuals, studied architecture at Yale, and first gained wide attention as the co-architect, with Renzo Piano, of the Centre Pompidou, in Paris. The Pompidou, which opened in 1977, immediately reenergized the Paris art and architecture scene, and it gave Rogers instant status as a kind of radical within the establishment. In 1989, while most of the architectural profession in London was retreating in fear and confusion before Charles's onslaught, Rogers published a strongly worded counterattack.
"If princes want to argue, they should stop being princes," Rogers said in an interview in Marxism Today, and went on to call Charles's attempts to direct the architecture of public buildings "very vicious and questionable democratically. This is the reason that in the past some countries beheaded their kings." Rogers, whose socialist leanings and fondness for being in the public eye made him a natural spokesman of the architectural opposition, tried to meet with the Prince. But, he said, three different meetings were cancelled by Buckingham Palace.
Today, Rogers is the most politically influential architect in England. He has designed the Millennium Dome, in Greenwich, and has completed the sleek new London headquarters for Lloyd's and Channel 4. He and his wife, Ruthie, who operates the fashionable River Cafe restaurant, are among Tony and Cherie Blair's closest friends. He has been appointed to run a national government task force on reclaiming derelict urban land, and he has become an ardent environmentalist, arguing that advanced technology will allow architects to create modern buildings that will use less energy. Rogers has carved out a position for himself at the intersection of political and architectural power, giving him the very role Charles had presumed for himself as the nation's aesthetic conscience.
When Rogers speaks, he even sounds like a politician. "Britain and Tony Blair are saying we have to be seen as a creative society," Rogers told me. "There is a tremendous attempt to show that Britain is good at more than preserving the past."
THE Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture is housed in a pair of faded John Nash villas in Gloucester Gate, opposite the northern reaches of Regent's Park. Both the buildings and the location sound grander than they are; despite imposing Doric columns and six-over-six windows, the houses have seen better days, and the neighborhood is funky Camden Town, a long way from Belgravia. I had expected something with the polish of a wealthy foundation, but when I visited, on a recent spring afternoon, I found a set of shabby rooms embalmed in eerie silence. (Adrian Gale, the institute's current head, compares the premise to "a third-rate provincial hotel.") A bust of Charles stands in the lobby, not far from a small desk at which the institute's few publications are for sale.
Charles originally conceived of the institute as both a school and a research center, but it has developed a reputation as "a finishing course for people who weren't quite sure what to do--rich kids coming for a year of drawing or painting," in the words of one former faculty member. The only academic program that ever really got going is "the foundation," a one-year introductory course in architecture. At its busiest, the school has never had more than about sixty students.
From the beginning, the institute has been riven by turf battles among rigid classicists--for whom the place was a vehicle for promoting their own narrow vision of what architecture should be--more social-minded architects, and various New Age types to whom some of Charles's other interests appealed. (One such group, called Temenas, was described by a friend of the Prince as "an alternative spiritual group--they begin their meetings by lighting a candle and talking about sacred geometries.") Architects, scholars, and critics figured that there was no better way to promote their own agendas than to get close to the Prince. As one architect said, "A hopeless bureaucracy of people uninterested in architecture was created."
Since Charles does not finance the institute but gives it only his sponsorship, its program has been shaped in part by those who pay the bills, estimated at two million pounds a year. The benefactors seem to be people who wish to maintain ties to the Royal Family, such as the philanthropist Drue Heinz and several Middle Eastern potentates, who in 1993 persuaded the institute to house a department devoted to Islamic design.
"I knew it was time to go when Lord Morris"--the institute's chairman from 1992 to 1997--"asked me who Norman Foster was," one former faculty member told me. Foster, in fact, gave a lecture at the institute in 1995, and was promptly attacked in an interview by Richard John, a dogmatic traditionalist who was the institute's director at the time. The turnover in directors has had less to do with Charles's management style than with the whims of the Prince's courtiers, who have veered back and forth between trying to improve his image and trying to please him. "I remember him once saying, 'I can't stand being involved with so many people who don't agree with me,'" one of his friends said to me.
The appointment, in January, of Adrian Gale, a modernist who once served an apprenticeship with Mies van der Rohe, to run the institute was viewed by diehard classicists as the final admission that the Prince's vision had failed. Architects' Journal published a cartoon of the Prince kneeling before the Seagram Building, with Gale's head perched on the top. But Gale's hiring is both less ideological and more political than it appears. Gale's wife knows Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, who recently took over the institute's board. When palace spin doctors reportedly demanded a new and manageable chief, Gale, the retired head of an architecture school in Devon, was a comfortable known quantity.
I asked Gale why he had agreed to become the institute's director, and he replied, "This is not something I sought or expected or even necessarily wanted. I came here with one single purpose, which is to get this place taken seriously."
Gale, an affable, white-haired man who was wearing a beret and a dark suit, acknowledged the distance between himself and the classicists who used to surround Charles. " 'New' is a word that you can use at the institute, but 'modern' is not," Gale said. When he first met with the Prince, he recalled, Charles "spat out the word 'modernism,' it flew past me and hit the wall, splat. He is deeply suspicious of technology and science, and he remains suspicious of modernism."
Gale sees himself as caught between what he calls "the princelings" in the palace, who would like to see Charles close down the institute, and the traditionalists, who complain that Gale is making a mockery of the Prince's original vision. He believes that the institute can be saved only if it can be redirected toward more socially responsible ends than teaching students how to draw Corinthian columns. "The Prince knows that we're in the Last Chance Saloon," he said to me. The institute, he says, has been "a laughingstock. The teaching has been superficial-- about how you dress the building, not about space, not about soul."
The Prince, Gale believes, sees architecture the way he does, as something profound. "Both Mies van der Rohe and the Prince recognize that buildings have souls, that they have a spirit about them," Gale said. But he spoke of the Prince almost wistfully; to Gale, it seems, Charles is the student he knows he could convince, if only the Prince would pay attention.
Some of Charles's acolytes take a different view of the institute. "The Prince's brilliant ideas have not been defeated--only his institute," Rodney Cook, an American classicist who helped start a foundation in the United States to support the institute, told me. "The modernist establishment waged a campaign against him, and they defeated him. It's pretty hard to fight the establishment. but that's what he tried to do."
IF Britain's modernists weren't exactly in the mainstream in 1984, they are unquestionably the establishment today. While the Prince remained stuck on the same idea for a decade, these architects worked on important commissions all over the world. James Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie, in Stuttgart, a mixture of rich stone and bright, even garish color, brilliantly turned classicism inside out and became the most important museum of the mid-eighties. Foster's monument to custom-made high tech, the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank headquarters, provoked skepticism with its billion-dollar price tag, but it was widely admired aesthetically. Rogers was the only one of the three to do his most notable work at home. His headquarters for Lloyd's, in the City of London, is a skyscraper with such richness and visual complexity that its very existence seems to refute the Prince's argument that modern architecture has to be brutal, cold, and mute.
By the time the Prince's classical crusade had peaked, Stirling, Foster, and Rogers were at the top of their profession, and the world recognized it, even if the Prince of Wales did not. They were having considerable effect on their fellow-architects, too, replacing the brutalist style of the previous generation with something that was lighter and more nimble and more sensitive to the need for public space.
Rogers, in victory, no longer sounds like the architect who took on the Prince, whom he now describes as "slightly cornered by his own structure." Neither does Foster or Nicholas Grimshaw. "We've been very well treated by Prince Charles," Foster said to me, sitting at a round table at the end of his cathedral-like drafting room, across the Thames from Chelsea. "His heart is in the right place. There is a difference between him and the advisers who have clustered around him. I am not going back into that debate." He paused for a moment. "But can you name one single building that came out of that debate? One emblematic building? One Guggenheim Bilbao, one important thing? There was nothing."
Grimshaw is similarly relaxed about his former royal opponent. "I think you could give the Prince some credit for starting the debate, and a lot of what he said was quite heartfelt," said Grimshaw, whose tiny office is decorated with a framed photograph of his classic Citroen DS-19. "But I believe that we represent the mainstream. We have a tradition in Britain of exploring materials, of shipbuilding, of good, construction-oriented design."
If there is a problem with British architecture right now, it is not with its quality but with its uniformity: Foster's work may be the sleekest, Rogers's the most futuristic, Grimshaw's the most structure-driven, but they are more similar than they are different, and there are not many lively voices dissenting from their mode of reserved modernism. British architecture is better than it has been in half a century, but the modernist establishment has become, in its own way, something of an academy. Modernism, however much it may be evolving, is hardly the avant-garde. (Indeed, at the end of the twentieth century it is a somewhat conservative force, which is why architects and politicians in Britain have become so comfortable with one another.) The modernist victory feels almost too neat, particularly since James Stirling, by far the most idiosyncratic voice in British architecture of his generation, died in 1992, too soon to see things turn around. Despite having created a masterpiece in Stuttgart, Stirling died thinking that he was not respected at home. But he, too, has won: his building at No. 1 Poultry, in the heart of the City--the one that Prince Charles denounced as a nineteen-thirties wireless--was finally completed this spring, and its stone turrets and chartreuse and pink trim add the one note of joyous bombast to the otherwise cool sleekness of new London architecture.
Paradoxically, the man whose very name connotes the establishment, the Prince of Wales, is now an outsider, his power drained by his indifference to the forces at work around him. Charles wanted to be able to influence the course of architecture, and, at the same time, to retreat behind royal prerogative when asked to account for his actions. Still, he has always managed to maintain a certain noblesse oblige. When he finally met the architects whose National Gallery design had provoked his famous carbuncle remark, he spoke politely to them, and reportedly found them quite gracious. The Prince said, "I'm sorry it had to be you."
They replied, "We're sorry it had to be you."
[Four color photos (158K)] Clockwise from the top: the Lloyd's building by Richard Rogers, at right; the central atrium of Norman Foster's ITN headquarters; Nicholas Grimshaw's Waterloo International Terminal; the Channel 4 building, also by Rogers.
Paul Goldberger is Cultural Affairs Editor of The New York Times.
