Of all the speeches Charles III will give as king, none will be as incendiary as one he gave as prince. Speaking at a 1984 gala dinner celebrating the Indian architect Charles Corea, the then Prince of Wales launched, to the horror of his hosts, into a devastating evisceration of contemporary architecture. He labelled a new tower, still on the drawing board, designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe as “yet another giant glass stump” and likened a proposed extension to the National Gallery by ABK Architects to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. Both projects were aborted. ABK never fully recovered. British architecture changed for decades.
What can we learn about our new King from his meddling with architecture during his long stint as heir apparent? A decade after the carbuncle speech, Prince Charles launched his own architecture magazine titled Perspectives on Architecture. Surprisingly diverse, the journal included pieces on anarchist groups squatting development sites intermingled with odes to Islamic geometry.
