Even the normally supportive London Evening Standard has expressed anxiety about the scrapping of Rogers Stirk Harbour’s Chelsea Barracks residential development in London. The Qatari developer has called it a day following the intervention of the Prince of Wales, who wants a so-called traditional design for the site. So two years of work, countless public consultations and a very positive report from planning officers at Westminster City Council have come to nothing. Now it is start again time, with the Qataris pledged to involving the Prince’s Foundation, looking for different approaches, lots of architects to be used and so on.
The effect of the inevitable delay that will ensue means thousands of jobs will be affected in the short term, and in the longer term investors might think twice before putting substantial backing into proposals which run the risk of being derailed at the last moment on a princely whim. (And whim it is, since if it were a considered architectural position it would have been stated long before all concerned wasted their time and money on the abandoned design.)
As this blog has remarked before, the Prince’s intervention in this case raises serious issues, but not the simple-minded classicism-versus-modernism stuff trotted out in most newspapers. (I say let clients use the architects they want to, and let the quality of the design be the measure of success, not the style.) The real question is about the governance of London, and the way that international investors are treated, particularly at a time of extraordinary economic pressure.
The Prince is behaving as though London is Qatar and he is the Emir. This brings into question the appropriateness of someone who is part of a system of constitutional monarchy making personal interventions involving the heads of foreign states. This is particularly the case when they will have significant financial and business implications for a city which is part of a working democracy.
It should not be thought that the Prince is simply expressing a bystander’s point of view. He has been exerting his influence in other places and with other organisations in what some would regard as an improper fashion. I am told, for example, that one of his representatives hinted to the National Trust that if it did not use architects more to his taste, he might reconsider his role as patron. The Trust indicated that it wasn’t too bothered.
Interestingly, the Trust has a headquarters which is a model of sustainable design, and a fine piece of architecture, in Swindon. The Prince is always going on about green matters, but doesn’t seem to have made an appearance in this building, which seems odd. Perhaps I am misinformed.
His latest foray into the world of improper influence concerns the Crown Estate, which is run for the benefit of the taxpayer, not the House of Windsor. It is said that the Prince poked his nose into design proposals for the Piccadilly Hotel because he was ‘concerned’. This led to a very robust exchange of views with the architect, Sir Jeremy Dixon. I hope the Crown Estate sticks to its guns too. Why the Prince picks fights with the good architects (clue: they get peerages and knighthoods because they are good, not bad) is a mystery. He never picks on the villains.
Finally, perhaps I should say that I am not a rabid republican, but a supporter of constitutional monarchy for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with the rather subtle system of checks and balances which forms part of our organizational culture. The Prince is unbalancing the system, because he is actually using his undoubted power. The point about our system is that the moment Royals use power, the case for them having any begins to dissolve. The Prince should be more like his sister. Or indeed his architect cousin, the sainted Duke of Gloucester.
on Jun 13th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Just one problem, Paul
These guys get knighthoods and peerages because they are fantastically well connected, have powerful friends, and can exert influence…what does that sound like?…Oh Yeah!, like a Prince, another title!
It is up for debate whether they are good, bad or more or less deserving than the many fantastic unsung heroes of this profession up and down the country, who don’t get more than a line in your Journal, whilst most Architectural mags would publish Lord Foster’s shopping list.
Funny that they practice in London too…..not Bradford, or Salford.
on Jun 13th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
It is all too clear that Prince Charles’ intervention toppled the Rogers’ scheme not because the Prince is the Prince, but because he simply articulated what reasonable people up and down the country were thinking: that the Rogers design was ugly. If people thought that the Rogers scheme was inherently right, Charles would not have been heeded.
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 8:38 am
On the point about being well connected, these architects didn’t start out like that (unlike the Prince). Unsung heroes in Slaford or anywhere else don’t seem to have any particular relevance to this debate.
‘People up and down the country’ have little knowledge of the site, the design, the planning constraints, or Westminster council’s attitude (supportive). There is no reason why they should. The correspondent seems to be confusing the Great British Public with members of the Belgravia Residents’ Association, an entirely different kettle of fish, if that is not too flattering to the BRA.
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 9:09 am
I think your observation Paul that style is less important than quality of design, is intelligent and welcome, and all to absent from common architectural commentary on this issue.
I agree to some extent with what the first poster said. I also believe that even good architects are not always right (I’m an architect myself).
I also believe that most of what Adam, Terry and other similar architects trot out today is of relatively low quality, and is badly shown up by the architecture of the past it is inspired by.
What I reject totally is the idea that Rogers has been hard done by. All the talk by commentators about derailling a democratic process is hogwash. The Qatar’s have the right to choose any architect they like (as you have said). They also have the right to be advised by anyone they like. If you read their statement, it reads more like a defence of democracy than an undermining of it (they noted the 400 odd objections whilst the planners did not).
It is a fact that there has always been a ‘mafia’ in this country and others which has attempted to ‘force’ it’s tastes on people. Not onlly in architecture but in all the arts. This backfired dramatically in the 60’s and 70’s for architects, culminating in the marginalisation which started in the ’80s. Most of us architects and commentators look at modern buildings in magazines and know them through imagery, rather than live in and use such buildings (on the whole). The hypocrisy of this professional mafia has become all too clear for everyone, and it is this that gives the Prince his power base. It is architects who are out of touch on the whole, rather than the prince.
The planners were no doubt influenced, not by the tastes of this mafia, but by the opportunity to create jobs during this economically difficult time. This goes back to a nagging concern I have about the built environment being used as a cash cow rather than a resource for all.
Had it been some crass developer led shopping mall, the planners would still have found a way to back it for the same reason (Westfield?), and architects would have denounced it. But since one of ‘their own’ is adversely affected, the idea that such a large and prominent site should be more carefully mulled over finds no favour with them.
As long as Rogers has been paid for the work he has done, there should be no issue.
Having said all that, the latest soundings are that Terry and Adam are being drafted in. If this is the case then I think this is also wrong. There should be a competition, of the old fashoined ‘anonymous’ kind. Terry Rogers and Adam (and I hope also Moneo, Siza, Wright & Wright, Caruso St John, CZGW and others) should enter it
Thats the best way forward.
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Oh and RSHP should enter it aswell of course!
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 9:34 am
The democratic process involves balancing arguments for and against any development, taking into account the professional advice of planning officers, but finally deciding via elected representatives. That process has bee utterly derailed here, with a substantial cost to Westminster council caused by an irresponsible princely intervention. The fact is that the client chose RSH, and have only changed as a sort of feudal homage. This is no way to run a wold city in a 21st century democracy, as former London minister Nick Raynsford said on the Today programme on Saturday morning. And let’s remember who the clients were for some of the dreadful failed developments of the 60s and 70s. It wasn’t architects.
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
The claim about feudal homage is like the claim of vote rigging in Iran. Everyone would like it to be true, it seems to make sense that it should be true (afterall the behaviour fits our perceptions) but there is no evidence that it is!
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
It is prescient, as much as it is unusual, to read the intelligent comments of Muhammad Badr (Michael Badu); clearly an individual with strong and perspicacious opinions.
I have this to say to him in sympathy for one who still has enough life remaining to be concerned.
Apologists are legion and feral, believing desperately in their own self imposed delusions. A notion contrived in common with the gravy train establishment which constructs a self image as nothing more than something it invests in.
It is the role of such apologists to excuse the abuses of the few for their own ends. Architecture has no position on urban regeneration which is not already over coded by the interests of its developer pay masters. Architects weep for their lost profits, a practice which, as a braying group, they have long since used to assuage a guileful refusal to engage social problems through the design and execution of their works.
Yet that it once was, not so, but it is not now; and everybody knows.
The Architectural pack has augmented a peerless bastion of conservatism, so empty and devoid of life, that even a monarchist can make them look outmoded, mealy mouthed, self-serving, ingenuous Ozymandians.
What magic is it that turns democratic accountability into the hammer of stylistic dictatorship?… as if style itself had any substance or worth beyond mere packaging.
Turn the head of the majority to the feckless territories of style, averting their attention from the political issue of venal profit. All talk of style is immediately a means of concealing the mechanisms of profit making for the developer as well as for the architect.
Everybody knows the ship is sinking
Everybody knows the captain lied…
Surely the central object of substance for architects, for those who are trained in the practice of architecture for the benefit of the majority (are there any left?) engages issues which not only range beyond style and form, but also address ways in which buildings are used by inhabitants of both the urban and domestic spheres. All architects profess this to be their central objective, yet persist in ’maximising the site’ through all available means: the crudest of which is the double loaded, single aspect, parallel housing tenement, spaced at minimum distance of 18 mtrs. (Ring any bells?)
If I’m not mistaken, this very form of development was repeatedly vilified as a bete noir of the International Style’s urban concerns, a deep memory not lost on the rank and file.
In these unstable times, only an idiot would claim the shelter of democracy whilst inferring that the few can gainsay the majority.
Nothing is innocent, architecture is already dead.
For those of you who excuse yourselves from having to think this, I leave you with your wittering, self-serving, optimism.
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Well at least they get a vote in Iran!
I think there is ample evidence that Qatari Diar withdrew their planning application because of the private letter our prince wrote to their emir. The company explicitly stated that it would proceed with its application when this all blew up, then changed its tune. Given Westminster planners’ broad support for the design there is only once conclusion that can reasonably be reached.
I rather hope that RSH stick in there. They were removed from the Welsh Assembly project, only to be reinstated when the logic of their approach won the day. They know more about the site than any other architect in the world.
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
As for my old friend Kevin Rhowbotham, all I can say is that in real life he is much more fun than he sounds!
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
What we need here is 200 Georgian townhouses built in terraces, @ £6m - £20m each, say about 40/hectare, Lord Rogers could do the interiors as his house looks very modern inside.
on Jun 16th, 2009 at 2:17 am
What a fascinating issue! And to think that we are debating the limits of Princely power in the 21st century.
As an American, I don’t have a dog in this fight; and while my sympathies (by reflex) lie with the new urbanist Prince, I have no idea whether this dispute — popularly titled “classicism vs. modernism” — is in fact about urbanism at all.
It would be extremely useful to see site plans and elevations so that those of us not nearby can get a sense of whether either design (Roger’s or Terry’s) is really any good — “good” in this case meaning urban and walkable.
Or is this dispute merely about buildings as “precious object,” designed for looking good on a post cards? Or from ten miles away?
I want to learn about the designs as the pedestrian would sense them, which so far as I am concerned trumps visual style.
Can you please direct me to some fair-handed on-line site where I can see the designs, rather than simply observe a debate about them.
on Jun 16th, 2009 at 11:43 am
So democracy is to be dictated by a billionaire architect? Fascinating glimpse into republican mindset I think. Never mind that all the Prince did was articulate the concerns of a majority of local residents.
I will admit I am a fan of Quinlan Terry’s work (which is no more pastiche than this modernist rubbish that ought to have died with Le Corbusier), but I do think there should be a public contest to see who comes up with the best plan. One, above all else, which meets the requirements of the local community.
Preferably one without the 50% 10 million pound housing / 50% 1960s estate style of Rogers plan.
Davud Sucher, chelseabarracks.co.uk th local residents action group against this development, has Quinlan Terry’s sketch on their website. It is worth remembering that Terry sketched this in a matter of hours, Rogers had a team of graphic artists working on his for two years. Terry’s was still overwhelmingly popular with the populace at large.
on Jun 16th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
More plans can be viewed on the website of the local campaigners:
http://www. chelseabarracks.org.uk
Also read the press section, link to Marcus Binney, Times article. December 11th 2008, ‘Not another Barracks for Pimlico’.
It’ not about style. It’s about the fact it was lousy development, really. All this nonsense about planning being ‘democratic’ and the ‘democratic process’ being usurped is precisely that, nonsense.
Paul Finch. of course. is always on the side of development and ‘important’ architects, but naturally his frequent media interventions to peddle his own views are perfectly legitimate!
on Jun 16th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Thanks very much for the links. Now I have to find one for Rogers’ design, unless the drawing(?) at
http://www.chelseabarracks.org.uk/index.shtml
are Rogers?
May I make a suggestion?
It doesn’t appear that there is really very much known about either design i.e. on-line. I am very much an urban design ‘hound’ and have read 8-10 articles so far on this fascinating issue and have yet to see even one discussion — intelligent or not — of the substance of the design dispute. It would be extremely useful for all parties if this blog could post some drawings in order to promote discussion of the two designs — taking into account that Terry’s may be very young. And drawings which show the two design approaches as they would appear to the pedestrian.
Beyond that I am intrigued by the (probably even more significant?) Constitutional issues concerning the proper role of the Royal Family. I mean, would it be OK for Charles to intervene directly (by making a phone call) if he were simply some other title, say a non-Royal “Duke of Poundsbury?” Where do you draw the line? Surely PC’s participation in the public planning process (via letters, testimony, etc) would have been ok? After all he is still a British citizen. Or no? Would even that be too far?
So where’s the line? Suppose you are an intelligent and concerned Royal and you don’t want to spend your life as a
I, personally, am torn in this specific case. (And if you think it odd that an American could feel so involved, please bear in mind that the British Royal Family is just about also the World Royal Family.) I have enormous respect for the substance of Charles’ views on urban planning and design. And I am pleased that he has been able to point a spotlight on so many important environmental issues.
But…but…in our world there has been some history of inherited (or other) power taking itself too seriously and preempting proper democratic process. (Putting it mildly.) So I hope Charles is not going over the line as I would hate to see his voice silenced. Of course I guess he could always abdicate and maybe that is the proper Constitutional tradition: “If you are a Royal and you feel like taking part in the hurly-burly of common politics, you must abdicate your spot in the Royal Queue.”
on Jun 16th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
btw, if “Rendered View 2″ at
http://www.chelseabarracks.org.uk/image_gallery.shtml
is indeed from Rogers, and fairly represents his design, he should have his head examined to put something like that out in public. It’s a terrible, comically dated, anti-urban design.
on Jun 16th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
It is indeed the design. And this article says what the problems are:
http://www.chelseabarracks.org.uk/uploaded_files/The_Times_11.12.08_1.pdf
It’s not about tradition v modernity. It’s about overdevelopment and banality, not to mention destruction of a historic building, and the denial of context.
on Jun 18th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
This scheme would be more suitable to East London. Totally out of character in one of the nicest parts of London.
on Jul 8th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Thanks for the comment Mr. Finch.
I had to laugh at the no doubt unintended misspelling!! Its S_A_L_F_O_R_D, you know, that place Up T’north. Very revealing, very unfortunate.
What everybody is missing here is that the client exercised its democratic right. End of story. Everything else is just Architects whinging as usual. In addition, to suggest that the future monarch has not earned the right of an opinion is also extremely undemocratic. This is an interesting example of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’, being exposed by a Prince!!
The very fact that the profession is facing its biggest crisis for over half a century should be persuasive enough to suggest that there is something that stinks in their world. The shameless display on Channel 4 of the awards last year had all the hallmarks of decadent self indulgent hubris awaiting a fate that only the greek gods could dole out.
Architects have enjoyed 15 years of uninterrupted growth, wealth and indulgence. They have, at the behest of their clients, who always stay in the shadows, wreaked modernist havoc upon our cities, with all other alternative voices cast out as blasphemers of their puritan ethic. Go and see ‘The Green Quarter’ in Manchester, or any other example in any city to see what an unholy mess of half-baked ideas that Architects for which will yet again be wholly blamed. I am not a fan of any ’style’, least of all the classical recreations of Quinlan and Co., but hey guys, there has got to be a better way than this!!
We have not learned, yet again.
What a mess.
on Jul 10th, 2009 at 9:54 am
The phrase ‘what everybody is missing’ never seems to apply to the person using it, thereby self-conferring on them unique insight and wisdom, scarcely justified by the mish-mash of opinions presented in this case.
I am sorry I transposed two letters, but much sorrier about the heavy-handed attempt to suggest I don’t know how to spell Salford. I am trying to understand the phrase ‘that Architects for which will yet again be wholly blamed’.
on Jul 11th, 2009 at 3:59 am
Touche - I did preface my comment with ‘unintentional’ by the way.
Interestingly, my background does confer a rather unusual, if not unique viewpoint. And my insights arise from working in and around the profession for 30 odd years. The wider issues are far more important than our wordplay, and I am even sorrier they don’t register above the noise of Architect’s hysteria over this Chelsea Sideshow.
Oh - I know you can spell Salford - it was a bit of Northern Scouse sarcasm…
on Aug 21st, 2009 at 6:31 am
amid the increasing noise, I note that the attempt by Charles and his organisation to remove Jean Nouvel from the One New Change project appears to have failed.
perhaps those expressing their concern in this matter could just take a moment or two to ponder a statement by Mike Hussey, then Director of Land Securities (developer of One New Change), that HRH “hadn’t seen the scheme, he just complained about the selection of the architect.”