He was the comedy villain of architecture, dismissed for his kitsch follies and ill-considered outbursts. But has Charles III actually been proved correct?
‘The most prominent architecture critic in the world” is how the New York Times once described King Charles III. It was 1989, and the then Prince of Wales was enjoying a wave of publicity after the launch of his spiritual crusade against the heresies of modern architecture. It was a high-profile, three-pronged attack, comprising a prime-time 75-minute BBC documentary, a dedicated V&A exhibition, and an accompanying coffee table book, grandly titled A Vision of Britain.
As architecture criticism goes, it was an unprecedented assault. “The prince’s performance, even sermon, was startling by television standards,” wrote critic Charles Jencks, “and I don’t know of any comparable use of the medium in our time. He looked straight into the camera, and six million viewers’ eyes, and told them what was wrong with them and what they should do about it.”
The prince relished his position as the high priest of taste. He gleefully scolded the royally chartered professions of architecture and town planning for creating “godforsaken cities” littered with “huge, blank and impersonal” buildings. His words were carefully tuned to grab headlines. Birmingham city centre was damned as “a monstrous concrete maze,” with a library that looked like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept”. The brutalist National Theatre on the South Bank was “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London”. The British Library looked “more like the assembly hall of an academy for secret police”.
