Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (25 page)

The problem for many architects—and for them the fatal flaw in Charles’s approach to architecture—is that his philosophy of harmony makes him conflate really important ideas about what makes buildings and towns livable with narrow definitions of beauty. His highest term of praise is “timeless,” yet many of the buildings he lauds would have looked aggressively modern in their own eras. “It’s when [the Prince] starts to engage in stylistic argument, that’s when I struggle,” says architect Ewen Miller. “Good architecture should be good architecture whether it’s an Arts and Crafts revival building, a Classical revival building or a glass box on the side of a cliff. Good architecture should transcend the style debate.”
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The village of Poundbury is what happened when the Prince decided that his speeches and articles and books and documentaries and letters and conversations were not enough. In his 1988 documentary and 1989 book—both entitled
A Vision of Britain
—Charles had fleshed out his thoughts about what makes for good and bad buildings and towns, asserting that in the planning and commissioning of new buildings and larger developments “we
can
do better. Our fellow citizens are demanding we do better. It is up to developers, the architects, the planners and the politicians to respond.”
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And, he might have added, princes. By creating on Duchy of Cornwall land an urban extension to Dorchester, he built a real community and a test bed for principles of community architecture.

The best-looking buildings in Poundbury are pretty cottages and a row of four white Arts and Crafts–inspired houses. One of Poundbury’s least successful structures is its fire station. The magazine
Building Design
derided it as “a collection of pasty sand-coloured brick and inelegant glazing.”
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The writer and critic Justin McGuirk excoriated the structure in the
Guardian
as a “dumpy neoclassical Georgian palace with three garage doors attached to it.”
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The relish with which critics attacked may have been connected to the misplaced belief that the Prince—who had criticized ABK’s National Gallery extension for resembling a “municipal fire station”—had designed Poundbury’s pompous pump house.

He hadn’t. Miller ruefully admits that was his doing, in an unsatisfactory collaboration with Poundbury master planner Leon Krier, a flamboyant Luxembourgeois. But the master planner works closely enough with the Prince that everything in Poundbury does bear the royal stamp. Their joint vision can be praised or blamed for streetscapes that stray from Georgian to Gothic, rustic to urban, an eclectic mix that
Building Design
called a “fruity melee of architectural costumes”—anything, in other words, but modern.
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Poundbury is the physical manifestation of a struggle with identity and of the tension between the old and the new. “I’ve always wanted to bring the baby back—that went out with the bathwater. Out went all sorts of really valuable things,” says Charles.
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In Poundbury, he is attempting to rediscover a lost England of his imagination. The emissary from Planet Windsor arrived on earth with romantic notions about villages and towns that were not just conurbations but communities, self-regulating ecosystems in which residents of different income levels and interests could flourish. Walt Disney had a similar idea. He planned EPCOT in Florida—the acronym stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—as a new town, announcing the scheme at a 1966 press conference In the end, EPCOT became a theme park, an annex to Disneyworld. When Disney Corporation did develop a new town, Celebration, in Florida, critics carped about its lack of authenticity. That’s a charge often leveled at the Prince’s English experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

That misses the point about Poundbury: it is remarkably pleasant; its residents, who number over two thousand, enjoy living there; in many of its ambitions, Poundbury is successful. Children do play on the village green. People of diverse ages and income levels live and work alongside each other, congregate in its public spaces, take tea in its caf
é
s, and walk along peaceful lanes to shop.

Some of Poundbury’s design solutions are innovative rather than old-fashioned. There are none of the cul-de-sacs popular among the builders of new housing estates that studies suggest foster higher car use. Thoroughfares—all Poundbury roads are through roads—counterintuitively encourage people to walk or cycle because routes are more direct and therefore shorter. Traffic-calming measures in Poundbury are often subliminal and rarely rely on signage.

“First thing I did was shout ‘Stop, stop the car. What is that?’” says Tim Knatchbull, describing his initial reaction to one of these measures. “There was this massive tree in the middle of the road and all the traffic was driving around the tree.” The friend who brought him to Poundbury explained: “‘What they found is the tree slows traffic down, it makes people make eye contact with each other, they’ve cut the accident rate and it’s a great success.’ And we went round the next corner into a square and there was a pub and people making eye contact and there was a factory just beside this pretty row of houses and although there were some things that just seemed wrong to me at first sight, that may have been because they were unusual. In any case I thought ‘Wow, I would love to live somewhere like this,’” says Knatchbull.
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Though he is a close friend and supporter of the Prince, it was 2005, twelve years after construction started, before Knatchbull finally toured Poundbury. On the death of his grandfather Lord Mountbatten, Knatchbull had inherited part of the Broadlands estate abutting Romsey in Hampshire and for decades came under pressure from volume house-builders to let them develop housing on the land. He rejected one scheme after another, feeling, as Charles did, that social problems correlated to poor housing and planning might be alleviated by better design, but he scoffed when a friend suggested a fact-finding mission to Poundbury. “I said ‘You’ve got to be kidding, right? You didn’t make that comment seriously, did you?’ Because anybody who reads the newspapers knows it’s a little nonsensical, neoclassical pastiche that only somebody as influential as the Prince of Wales could possibly bring about.”
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Knatchbull’s Poundbury tour inspired him to begin developing housing at Romsey with regular input from the Prince and in collaboration with the Prince’s Foundation for Building Communities and its former director, American Hank Dittmar. Sometimes seeing is the only route to believing.

CHAPTER 7

Harmonies and Disharmonies

Charles appears to be dancing. He’s wearing a double-breasted suit the glaucous gray of a seagull’s wing with a jaunty little purple flower tucked into the lapel. His brogues of ancient leather are planted on the lawn at St. James’s Palace in an effortless ballet fourth as he sways his upper body. His right arm describes a large and graceful circle. Three men and four women stand in a wide arc facing him. Beyond them in the flickering shade of 140-year-old London plane trees, further groups of guests arranged in the same formations await completion by their royal host.

“It is a sad fact,” the Prince observed in his foreword to a book called the
Hidden Geometry of Flowers
, “that our modern outlook does not recognize geometry as a language by which we may understand Divine order.”
1
The Prince perceives naturally occurring patterns in everything, not only flowers but in the glorious architecture of Chartres cathedral and in the five-pointed orbit of Venus, and perhaps that’s not so surprising. Throughout his life, aides have coaxed the people he meets into neat configurations before he arrives. The semicircle is a kinder shape than a straight line, allowing people to chat with each other until he reaches them, and affording Charles a swift exit should he avail of the opportunity, which he almost never does. The tight timetable of this event, slotted into an afternoon in June 2014 during a week of keynote speeches and the publication of his annual review and before he heads to Scotland to welcome his parents to Dumfries House, means he ought already to have moved on from this first group. He has been engrossed in conversation with members of the Swarovski family, whose business has been turning cut glass to commercial gold since the nineteenth century. Then, just as he turned to leave, Nadja Swarovski, the first female member of the company’s executive board, asked him a question and he paused, midstride.

His answer involves the subject everyone has notionally gathered to discuss—the science of biomimetics—but quickly expands to encompass a philosophy that for Charles explains everything about the world, and to a befuddled world might handily explain pretty much everything about Charles. This belief system, like its exponent, is one third complaint to two thirds transfiguring faith. Its kernel is this: modern thinking—or more precisely, Modernist thinking—has disconnected us from Nature-with-a-capital-N and from the trinity of celestial essences or objective Platonic values she embodies, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. The result is alienation and destruction. Yet there is still time—just—to reconnect—by creating “virtuous circles.” It is one of these circles the Prince is so enthusiastically pantomiming for Nadja Swarovski.

Biomimeticists have recognized what “mechanistic science” overlooks, that Nature has been running her own R & D experiments from the dawn of time, rejecting poor designs and preserving only the best, he tells Swarovski. In co-opting those designs, it is possible to create things that are in sympathy with Nature and are therefore more energy-efficient to manufacture or deploy, biodegradable just as fur, scales, feathers, bones, and vegetal life are, better, cleverer, more true, beautiful, and good. Building a market for biomimetics will foster a deepening appreciation of Nature and her creations along with a recognition that the extinction of any life-form means the loss of a natural solution engineered over millennia and often more technologically advanced than anything humans might come up with on their own. Products and services based on the invisible grammar of harmony will be in demand, and so businesses providing those biomimetics-based products and services will flourish, to the mutual, sustainable benefit of all in the circle, from microorganisms and potentially endangered species to commercial organizations and consumers.

It was with another virtuous circle in mind that the Prince founded Duchy Originals, aiming to create a market for sustainably produced goods to provide a boost to small farmers, benefit their free-ranging herds and flocks, protect the wildlife that flourishes in fields and hedgerows allowed to grow without blankets of pesticide and herbicide, and provide assurance to the consumer, who can enjoy an organic Original Oaten Biscuit, organic British Beef Meatball, or a slug of organic Old Ruby Ale safe in the knowledge that these and other Duchy Originals products are not tainted with chemicals or manufactured from the products of industrialized farming.

The Prince’s Trust is based on the idea of turning vicious cycles into virtuous circles, rerouting the destructive path through childhood deprivation, behavioral problems, poor prospects, crime, drugs, and alcohol dependencies into a new circuit in which the possibility of a better life provides the motivation to do the things necessary to attain that goal.

Each virtuous circle operates inside an expanding ring of concentric virtuous circles, just as vicious cycles intersect and gain in force. In holding a reception for biomimetics, Charles is attempting to signal the promise of the science—and the dangers of ignoring Nature—and to encourage what he calls “joined-up thinking,” to create what he explains to Swarovski is “an integrated picture in terms of water security, energy security, food security.” He frequently worries aloud about the dangers of unsustainable population growth coupled with climate change.

Most of the mechanisms that his International Sustainability Unit proposes to mitigate climate change are based on principles of enlightened self-interest in the form of tight virtuous circles that make it more profitable to conserve than destroy. Left unchecked, industries and countries interfere with ecosystems, which the Prince sees as the most fundamental virtuous circles of all, perpetuating themselves until malign or careless development upsets their natural balance.

“At the moment we are disrupting the teeming diversity of life and the ‘ecosystems’ that sustain it—the forests and prairies, the woodland, moorland and fens, the oceans, rivers and streams,” Charles writes in
Harmony
. “And this all adds up to the degree of ‘dis-ease’ we are causing to the intricate balance that regulates the planet’s climate, on which we so intimately depend.” He explains that his reason for writing the book—which happens to be his reason for just about everything he’s done during four decades as a philanthropist and charitable entrepreneur—“is that I feel I would be failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself if I did not attempt to point this out and indicate possible ways we can heal the world.”
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He wrote the book with the BBC broadcaster Ian Skelly and Tony Juniper, a prominent environmentalist working for the ISU, but the text is phrased in the Prince’s distinctive cadences, in the first person, and is clearly intended as his statement of belief. He insisted, despite the reservations of the publisher, on the title
Harmony
, and made a documentary of the same name with US filmmakers Julie Bergman Sender and Stuart Sender.

Charles’s overarching quest—the motivation behind everything he does—is to restore harmony. It is a particularly cruel irony that his mission frequently plunges him into conflicts and disharmony. He feels hurt by the controversies he creates and often not a little bewildered. A fan of the British TV comedy series
Blackadder
, he identifies, says someone who knows him well, not with the scheming antihero of the title or its dumb Prince but with the hapless Baldrick, a member of the lower orders whose “cunning plans” are ridiculed but often turn out to be right. Like Baldrick, Charles sometimes reaches the right conclusions via some questionable pathways. Like Baldrick, sometimes he just gets things wrong.