The Prince's Speech // Between Murphy & Mountbatten-Windsor
It is perhaps fitting to say that when I was first confronted with the idea of addressing His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales’ recent essay in the Architectural Review I was met with a peculiar thought. How does one reference in endnotes an essay written by royalty? Does one simply write, “HRH Charles, Prince of Wales” or is it more academically correct to use his ‘full’ name, Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor (I shan’t even attempt to include all his royal and noble titles)? Mundane as this thought may seem it raises a significant and important point: that as a result of his status within the British Monarchy, Prince Charles, unlike so many other academics, critics and indeed anyone interested in the built environment wields an authority and influence most architects can only dream of (Avoid Albert Speer reference here).
The prominent under-30 architectural critic, (and in my opinion, a respectable all round genius) Douglas Murphy points out for us that with great power, comes great responsibility, which can at times be abused. Murphy lists out in his less-than-flattering critique of Prince Charles’ latest foray into architecture, his long history of distain for the Modern Movement. Murphy describes the Prince of Wales as having “thrown his royal privilege around with total abandon…” (Murphy, 2014) and indeed he continues his tale with a story which architects are still scarred by: the day when Prince Charles declared the National Gallery Extension to be a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” (The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, 1984). It was of course His Royal Highness’ statement which became the inspiration for the much celebrated and feared Carbuncle Cup for Architecture (bdonline.co.uk, 2014).
The Carbuncle Cup's most recent additions.
Left: 2013 Winner, 465 Caledonian Road by Stephen George & Partners.
Right: 2012 Winner, Restoration of Cutty Sark by Grimshaw Architects.
Source: bdonline.co.uk
Murphy’s underlying social agenda is not difficult to deduce. His fight for the underdog and social equity is highlighted by his outright displeasure of the Prince’s rejection of “…modern architecture hand-in-hand with fighting the unions, deregulating the planned economy, smashing industry and rejecting the spectre of socialism…” (Murphy, 2014). This is of course not unwarranted, given the ongoing fear of the return to the era of Reganomics, and worse still, the return of the Lady, “whose not for turning,” the late Baroness Margaret Thatcher. Political alignments aside for the moment, Murphy has generated in his critique two extremely significant points which I believe are part of Prince Charles’ agenda. If we cast aside for a moment, the political disagreements and even the fact that Royalty has commented on architecture and focus solely on the list of ten items, perhaps we may discern more fruitful lessons on architecture.
There has of course been much intrigue and a wide array of commentary on the Prince’s essay. Supporters such as Patrick Lynch of Lynch Architects comments that “the art of architecture has always concerned the role that geometry plays in mediating, as ornament and spatiality, representations of nature and of civic pride.” (Fulcher, 2014). Murphy however believes that this is not enough and within his ten proposed principles, he identifies the city as a place for everyone and the fact that the home of a gentleman is not confined to a castle (Murphy, 2014). In a sense, I feel Murphy’s agenda of social equity is not unlike the Classical principles of decorum, where a building’s function is reflected in its architecture in terms of scale, form and materiality, an echoing of the Roman ideal of Cicero. It was indeed this philosopher who believed that “if you have any skill [as an architect] you must build my house in such a way that whatever I do shall be seen by all.” (Cooper, November 2007, p, 10). In an age where we are consumed by individualism (just look at Instagram and ‘selfie’ in popular culture) and that the home as a private singular domain now takes greater stand than the forum as a public and open realm, this may prove to be why our public spaces are neglected and unloved (Further reading, see Chan, 2014). For the Greeks and Romans, who gave us the contemporary word ‘idiot’, its Classical origins idios meant ‘private’ or ‘privacy’ (Tuan, 2012, p. 118). Further to this, what we also find in the critics of the Prince is the fact that he is seen to be “neglecting issues of affordability, environmental and social justice and [that] we urgently need to have planning principles that are inclusive and egalitarian.” (Prof. Alister Scott in Fulcher, 2014). The social hierarchies which have contributed to an imbalance of power, of landed gentry and of social inequity are scarcely addressed in the vision for a ‘sustainable’ architecture of 2050.
The two points which I found most beautifully intriguing however, is when Murphy states that “Architecture is not a language…but architecture can still be read” (Murphy, 2014). I must admit that I am both able to agree and disagree with this statement. Murphy of course has rightly seen that Prince Charles was talking of an architectural language as “an underlying grammar [which] implies urban life peaked in the piazzas of Renaissance Florence – a period of pestilence, gangster princes and public executions.” (Murphy, 2014). Harsh as this discussion of Renaissance architecture is, it has after all provided us with Palladian principles which remained significant in architecture until the industrial revolution, but I think it is too soon to simply discard the so-called architectural language so entirely. This, in spite of the fact of course that as Murphy highlights in The Architecture of Failure, architectural language is so easily cast about and thrown around in discourse and I am of course sometimes guilty of this crime for which I apologise most sincerely.
As I wrote in one of my first posts for this blog on the Tamar Government Complex in Hong Kong (Chan, 2012) however, the debate on whether architecture can be unpacked as a language of legibility which embodies ideas rather than merely as objects of function has long been contested (Eco, 1986, p. 57). To reinforce the idea of language we must return to Roland Barthes and his semiotic world. Here we find the greatest proponent of architecture as “…truly a language; the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city…simply by living in it, by wandering though it [and] by looking at it” (Barthes, 1986, p. 92). Yes it is true we no longer inhabit a society where Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders talk in the city but as Murphy says, we still read our cities and thus, our cities are still, in a sense, speaking to us.
I am here reminded of a statement, or rather, a nostalgic and melancholic reflection made by Professor Peter Kohane, a scholar on the works of CR Cockrell and Louis Kahn. It was he who once said to me (I am recounting from memory) that “Classical Renaissance buildings cannot be built today, as they are simply inappropriate reflections of our time, so I keep the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian to myself, as a kind of personal fondness and enjoyment.” His Royal Highness is perhaps acting out of a similar nostalgic framework, after all these buildings still hold special places in our history and our hearts in the lineage of architectures which have come and gone, that is why we haven’t torn it all down. Indeed as Murphy has championed in reviewing the Dresden Museum, who else could describe for a better future than Murphy, declaring “Libeskind is at his best when creating a charged reinterpretation of an existing structure, where the weight of the cultural subject that the building embodies is expressed through its juxtapositions, tensions and fragments” (Murphy, 2012). It is this tension between then and now, the liberation from stringent style, from the orders which defined the centuries of old and the exciting technological and formal advancements of steel, concrete, timber and glass which is defining the architecture of the 21st Century.
I do not profess to be a hopeless romantic like Wordsworth, who “wandered lonely as a cloud”, and of course I know many of us dream of cute stone cottages in the picturesque countryside as an Austen-esque life of ‘simpler times’ in Mr. Darcy’s estate of Pemberly and Derbyshire, away from the chaos of modern life. This is perhaps where critics saw Prince Charles as drifting away from the realities of the 21st Century, when he talks of “sacred geometry” and a return to Plato’s “universal languages of humanity.” (HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, 2014). We do of course have to remember that architecture is not and can never be entirely free of these ideas, I mean, if we were to be entirely rid of these ideas, why then is Vitruvius still taught? Why did Le Corbusier, one of the pioneers of the Ville Radiuse and Plan Libre come up with his own anthropomorphic Le Modular?
From Vitruvius to Le Modulor - Classical genius or architectural bollocks?
Source: Wikipedia, Fondation Le Corbuser
This is where I believe Murphy and the Prince of Wales may collide. Murphy talks of “harmony involving dissonance [where] cities must improve their interactions with the natural world.” I agree wholeheartedly. What needs to be recognised however is that nature possesses its own rhythmic and seasonal patterns, which is perhaps where Prince Charles’ comments on “grammatical ground rules” and “designed to fit within the landscape” comes in (HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, 2014). But similarly of course, I wish to point out that my former professor, celebrated Australian architect Glenn Murcutt is more poetic when he calls for an architecture which “touches the earth lightly.” (Chan, 2013). What I believe is most important however is to recognise that the Classical tradition’s lessons are still embedded within contemporary approaches to architecture, as Murphy mentions, today’s work is not merely mimicry but a critical abstraction.
I would suggest two lessons from the Prince of Wales’ essay and Murphy’s subsequent critique. Firstly, architecture is not literal; it is like all arts, interpretive and abstract. In an age where in-fill and adaptive reuse is taking flight in our ancient cities, we do not strive to recreate the past, we strive to reinterpret architecture with current materiality and ideas, fusing the past with the present. This in particular for Prince Charles, may be difficult to accept but sadly your Royal Highness, it must be so. Second, I believe architecture is in constant flux, it is reflective, critical and an embodiment of our times, our societies, and a reflection of times gone by. It is therefore, in constant motion and can never be considered stagnant. Just as English has shifted from Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter to the post-Orwellian text speak of LOL and ROFL, architecture, if we can consider it to be a legible language, continues to morph and change (for better or worse remains to be seen).
One thing we can perhaps be thankful for however, regardless of how we feel about an outdated hierarchical establishment (though headed by a wonderfully kind and always respectable grandmother) or whether all post-modernist buildings should be considered monstrous carbuncles is this: Prince Charles’ essay and ten points of architecture for 2050 have stimulated quite fruitful debate, appeared on several major publications and stimulated discussion, which at the end of the day will hopefully lead to better directions and even more hopefully, better architecture. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we are all wishing for the coming New Year?
References
Barthes, Roland. ‘Semiology and the Urban’ in M Gottdiener & AP Lagopoulos (eds), The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 87-98.
Bdonline.co.uk, Carbuncle Cup. Retrieved 30 December 2014 from: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/buildings/carbuncle-cup/.
Chan, Hugo. “The Landmark: A City Symbol,” Research Paper written in partial fulfilment of course requirements for BENV1221 – People, Place & Design at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2012.
Chan, Hugo. “Becoming Introspective: The Transitioning Courtyard Pattern from an Exterior Public Domain into an Interior Self-Conscious Realm,” Research Paper written in partial fulfilment of course requirements for BENV7227 – A History of Housing at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2014.
Cooper, Kate. “Closely Watched Households: Visibility, Exposure and Private Power in the Roman Domus.” Past and Present, no. 197 (November 2007): 3-33.
Eco, Umberto. “Function and Sign: Semiotics of Architecture”, in M Gottdiener & AP Lagopoulos (eds), The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Fondation Le Corbusier. “Le Modulor, Not Located, 1945,” Retrieved 31 December 2014 from:
http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=7837&sysLanguage=en-en&itemPos=82&itemSort=en-en_sort_string1%20&itemCount=215&sysParentName=&sysParentId=65.
Fulcher, Merlin. “Profession reacts to Prince Charles’ 10 Design Principles,” The Architect’s Journal, 22 December 2014 from: http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/profession-reacts-to-prince-charles-10-design-principles/8674432.article.
HRH, Charles The Prince of Wales, “Facing up to the Future: Prince Charles on 21st Century Architecture,” The Architectural Review, 20 December 2014 from: http://www.architectural-review.com/essays/facing-up-to-the-future-prince-charles-on-21st-century-architecture/8674119.article.
Murphy, Douglas. “Dresden Military Museum by Daniel Libeskind,” Icon, 29 February 2012, from:
http://www.iconeye.com/architecture/news/item/9685-dresden-military-museum-by-daniel-libeskind.
Murphy, Douglas. “Prince Charles’s 10 Principles for Architecture – and 10 Much Better Ones,” The Guardian, 27 December 2014 from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/27/prince-charles-10-principles-architecture-10-better-ones.
The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. “A Speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the 150th Anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Gala Evening at Hampton Court Palace, 30 May 1984 from: http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-royal-institute-of.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning. Staunton, Virginia: George F. Thompson Publishing, 2012.