Prince Charles softens tone in attack on modern architecture; calls for climate change battle

Prince Charles softens tone in attack on modernism

LONDON — Britain’s modern architects still have a formidable foe in Prince Charles, but a quarter century after he first attacked the profession in a famously fiery speech, the heir to the British throne wants to work with the practitioners of the trade — not trash them.

That was the gist of his return to the Royal Institute of British Architects Tuesday night, 25 years after he described some modern architecture as a “monstrous carbuncle” defacing the face of the city he loved.

The youthful passions of his earlier speech seem to have dissipated as Charles made a quiet speech calling for architects to embrace “organic” forms in a quest for beauty and harmony, not just dazzling abstract designs and short-term financial gains.

He repeatedly called for the august institute to join forces with his Foundation for the Built Environment in a cooperative effort to help save the world from the dangers posed by climate change and other woes.

There were no killer attack lines on famous modernist icons, and no diatribes, but Charles’ aesthetic point of view was extremely clear as he described the way modernist projects had severely damaged Britain’s towns, cities and countryside since his youth in the 1960s.

He described many urban renewal projects as failed, soul-destroying enterprises that still blight the landscape, and he bemoaned the primacy of the automobile over pedestrians in modern towns and cities. At times he cast his argument in moralistic terms, decrying modernism as an assault on nature.

His central argument is that modernist architects have embraced technology as a solution for all society’s problems, setting in motion global warming and leaving mankind spiritually adrift.

“It is one of the legacies of the long Modernist experiment that we find ourselves so cut off from the real pulse of the natural world,” he said, saying that earlier forms of architecture repeated nature’s forms and amplified its beauty.

He said the emphasis on technology has brought significant benefits in some aspects of life but had unintended costs.

“The side-effects caused by quite unnecessarily losing our balance and discarding and denigrating every other element apart from the technological are now becoming more and more apparent,” he said.

Charles moved well beyond architecture to characterize the recent banking and financial sector collapse as a symptom of mankind’s pursuit of monetary gain at the expense of unity with nature. He said the crisis had shown the cost of the “short-term, unsustainable and experimental” approach used by many professionals.

His 40-minute speech tied together climate change, overpopulation, the recession and even a loss of common courtesy and basic human decency as societal ills that could be addressed in part by a return to a more humane form of building design and city planning.

The result was a mixture of New Age rhetoric with a conservative, stick-with-what’s-worked-in-the-past approach. But it is also clear that Charles today is less preoccupied with questions about building styles and more concerned with the way building practices effect climate change.