A Vision of Britain: a Personal View of Architecture. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by James Gardner

ON NOVEMBER 3, in the auditorium of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, the most eminent architects and builders of the realm met in an extraordinary synod to debate what ought to be done about, and indeed to, that royal nuisance, the Prince of Wales. By the time it was all over, at least one person had gone on record comparing Prince Charles to the Nazis.

What could the Prince have done to deserve such contumely? For the past four years, he has freely expressed grave misgivings, if not downright contempt, for modernist architecture, which, he contends, has all but destroyed the beauty of London and much of rural Britain. What galls architects is not simply such things as his reference to the National Gallery's proposed new wing as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend," or his deriding another illustrious project for looking "like a 1930s wireless." Rather it is the unassailable fact that his quarrel with modernism has struck a raw nerve; that, at a grass-roots level, Charles's proposed reforms have won massive support. A documentary on the BBC, in which he aired his views, was wildly successful, while his recent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert was never less than packed to capacity. Meanwhile, his new architectural treatise, A Vision of Britain, was an instant best-seller, and has been avidly debated.

The fact that A Vision of Britain is now on sale in American bookstores is unlikely to send our citizens into a buying frenzy. Nevertheless the book does make a legitimate claim upon our attention. Recent controversies over the renovation of Times Square in New York, and the newly planned public library in Chicago, have not only raised our general awareness of architectural issues, but have also forced us to engage some of the challenging questions that the Prince of Wales has posed about contemporary British practice.

England was surely the first nation to enter the nineteenth century, and it has been, I submit, the last to leave it. A nation as wealthy as England, a nation too proud to be seen lagging behind fashion, has not wanted for modernists in all the provinces of its art. And yet modernism has always been viewed with suspicion as an imported intrusion upon the placid continuity of Englishness. It has never secured in England the enthusiastic following, in architecture or in anything else, that it has won in France, Germany, and America. With his fresh, earnest, and eloquent voice, the Prince of Wales has merely given greater respectability to this deeply rooted attitude. His message is simple: he inveighs against "the wanton destruction that has taken place in this country in the name of progress; the sheer, unadulterated ugliness and mediocrity of public and commercial buildings, and of housing estates, not to mention the dreariness and heartlessness of much urban planning. . . . The past, apparently, is largely irrelevant in this scheme of things, and its meaning and lessons [must] be destroyed."

If Prince Charles were wrong about ever-ything else, if all his reasoning and all his theories were awry, the thrust of his argument would still conquer anyone who disinterestedly surveyed the London skyline. In one brilliant rhetorical stroke, Charles has included a reproduction of London's skyline as it appeared in a photographically accurate painting by the great eighteenth-century Venetian artist Antonio Canaletto; over this, on translucent tracing paper, is superimposed a view of the same prospect as it appears today. Instead of the inspiring profusion of steeples gathered within the paternal orbit of St. Paul's, we see that massive structure itself all but smothered under a chaotic welter of denuded gridworks, as inharmonious within themselves as they are incompatible with any form, living or inanimate, that they stand next to. English modernists are just not good enough at the international style, the style that defines the glass boxes of Manhattan. Furthermore, they have a perverse love of molding buildings out of a glutinous yellowish concrete which almost instantly becomes caked in grime and exhaust fumes, and which, under the often overcast skies of that part of the world, rises out of the burdened earth like a new Wailing Wall. To see this infernal legacy is to recall that line of Shelley's: "Hell is a city much like London!"

But what would be the result if Prince Charles's recommendations were followed? To judge from the buildings he mentions favorably in A Vision of Britain-like Evans and Shalev's law courts in Truro, or Jim Whale's arcade at Craven Court-the return to tradition that he proposes would surely be an improvement upon the ravages of modernist architecture in Britain. Furthermore, there is something typically British in the re-enactment of earlier styles. As early as the late 1600s Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh were jazzing up their classical structures with allusions to medieval fortresses. From the Palladians early in the eighteenth century, through the neoclassicists and the Gothic Revivalists, down to the Beaux Arts pasticheur Bloomfield and the Craftsman Luytens, English architecture has been defined by a studious if uninspired imitation of earlier styles. With the exception of Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, who were geniuses, no truly great architect has emerged on the English scene, and one is inclined to believe that none ever will. The Prince's architecture may be pleasing; it most certainly will be an improvement on what is there now. But it is content with an archaeologist's knowledge of earlier practice, rather than an artist's intuitive comprehension of an earlier process. It is categorically second best.