All the King's Architects

...Bicknell is reconciled to a sort of postmodern territorial dispensation...

...Erith's provost house at Queen's College, Oxford, completed in 1960, offers a handsome contrast between its base of rusticated split-face masonry, with its deeply recessed joints running halfway up the two-story façade, and the smooth, seamless ashlar stonework above...

...Against the wishes of many Labourites, Blair followed through on the riskiest bet of them all, the Millennium Dome, originally embraced by Michael Heseltine, deputy prime minister in the preceding Tory government...

...For the first time, the dome will be eclipsed, when viewed from the Embankment or Waterloo Bridge, by a sterile pile rising above it, if developers get government approval...

...The library is an addition to the Ashmolean Museum, designed by the great classicist C.R...

...The smaller of the structures is an open, Doric-columned entrance pavilion resembling a miniature Greek temple...

...Since the late 1980s, the dean of Britain's classicists, Quinlan Terry, has been working on a half-dozen villas whose garden façades look out on the canal running along the park's northern edge...

...As Bicknell's remarks indicate, however, classicists' big-city commercial commissions have been few...

...The truth is that Robert Adam's stylistic innovations at the Sackler don't arise from any instinctive insight into the expressive possibilities inherent in the classical forms...

...Classical building is after all about buildings made to last hundreds, if not thousands, of years...

...Porphyrios's white stucco row-houses in posh London neighborhoods are chilly by comparison with their neighbors...

...I believe traditional architecture is suited to traditional environments—most obviously in my case the English countryside, suburbs, and small towns," Bicknell declares...

...Developers see it as a model for marketing...

...Good design pays," he says...

...All the King's Architects The surprising success of Prince Charles's anti-modernist crusade BY CATESBY LEIGH The village of Poundbury in southwest England is a conventional real estate development, in financial terms...

...Beyond the hall, the galleries—which are largely inspired by nineteenth-century classical work at the palace—are exuberant in color and ornament, and, like the entrance hall, dramatically skylit...

...Even Britain's formidable historic-preservation apparat is more or less wedded to the bogus Hegelian doctrine that modern times demand modernist architecture...

...The sculptor Alexander Stoddart, meanwhile, is as significant a figure in the classical community as any architect...

...There is in the world of business and government a culture of modernity which favors the use of exciting technology and short-lived buildings...

...These qualities, rather than innovation as an end in itself, are what bring traditional architecture to life...

...None of Poundbury's houses is McMansion scale, but this is an expensive development...

...Out-of-place tall buildings are a menace to London's historic character...

...Demetri Por-phyrios, a native of Greece whose practice is based in London, is a noteworthy example...

...An opening in the entrance pavilion pediment exposes the wooden king-post of the pavilion's roof truss—a belabored archaism...

...Hamilton says the prices the houses fetch and the rapidity of sales more than compensate...

...A magazine sympathetic to his architectural philosophy folded...

...A year later, the dome was shut down...

...Pundits and even preservationists protested that there should be just one façade mirroring the modern, open-plan office space within the principal building block...

...And his longtime advocacy of an ambitious classical scheme for Paternoster Square—the ancient London precinct adjacent to St...

...John Nash was one of the Buckingham Palace architects on whose work Simpson drew...

...Erith had a fine sense of abstract line, but much less feeling for ornament...

...But the panel is just implanted in the building without any kind of ornamental border, and the frieze's allegorical meanings are anything but self-evident...

...The large, blank urn in the middle symbolizes the Oxford authorities' hostility to any meaning...

...At this early stage in the process of cultural recovery, we don't yet have architects operating at that level...

...That should change over time, Oliver maintains, noting that the Poundbury model is already influencing the mainstream homebuilding industry in England...

...Mary the Virgin Church, also on High Street, with its richly wrought gate and broken pediment, its twisted columns and abundance of sculpture...

...Surely most people would prefer the more soundly conceived intricacy of the baroque south portal of St...

...Adam's innovations stem instead from a conscious desire to avoid looking stodgy...

...And then there's Poundbury...

...The friezes portray Britain's patron saints and episodes from the Homeric epics...

...It embodies his alternative "vision of Britain," with potentially broad ramifications for the nation's built environment...

...No windows with frames of aluminum or plastic-coated timber or any kind of synthetic material—the same goes for doors—and no clip-on muntins...

...He has crowned the city's Italian Center with impressive figures of Mercury and Italia, and added beautifully inlaid little ornamental capitals with the heads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Glaswegian worthies in the moderne façade of a building next to the Center...

...The scheme was shown a few years later in a nearby gallery, and visitors' comments were overwhelmingly favorable...

...The British traditionalists' architectural project—Prince Charles's project—is not just about striking a better balance between automobile and pedestrian, the familiar objective of America's New Urbanists...

...He adds, "I always felt that more would have been achieved if the resources that the prince's initiative attracted had been put into scholarships and professorships at established schools and colleges...

...And what of Prince Charles...

...Pound-bury-type schemes are for the moment in great demand and therefore command a premium...

...Last month, the Blair government struck a risky and controversial profitsharing deal under which American telecommunications magnate Philip E Anschutz will pay nothing for the structure, while assuming the cost of converting it into a 20,000-seat sports arena...

...But one understands why they hold it...

...A small number of highprofile jobs allows a well-placed coterie to inflict their "creativity" on the hapless public...

...Krier's plan calls for development in four phases and leaves a third of the tract open for parkland and recreation space...

...This vision is, in the end, antiquarian and self-defeating...

...But he's already made a positive difference...

...No fanlight inserts in the doors...

...It is odd, moreover, to see it stashed away behind converted row-houses—but then, that's part of the problem architects face building in England...

...It reflects a profoundly conservative cultural vision which many conservatives (especially those of a libertarian bent) loathe, and which many liberals (especially those who don't bother with architecture reviews) love...

...Surely most people would prefer the more muscular 1880s take on the royal insignia adorning the Brasenose College entrance on High Street in Oxford...

...Poundbury is exceptional in another way: The man behind it is Charles, Prince of Wales...

...They can't even design a door case...

...As with the Crown Estate, the Duchy is required to make money on its holdings and pass it along to the government...

...Porphyrios has also built a quadrangle at Magdalen College, Oxford, which nicely complements a nineteenth-century quadrangle by Bodley and Garner...

...And while there's nothing wrong with cooling the anti-modernist rhetoric and seeking a role in establishment organizations like the Royal Institute of British Architects, Britain's classicists should think of themselves as an artistic counterculture—offering a comprehensive alternative to the postmodern dispensation...

...Had it not been for his almost pathologically indecisive nature—the main reason for the Institute of Architecture's collapse in a factional tug of war—and his somewhat tumultuous personal life, he might have made a bigger difference...

...It represents, among other things, what Stoddart sees as the struggle between the noble Apollonian spirit of epic, symbolized by a relief of Homer adorning one urn, and the destructive Dionysian spirit of satire, symbolized by a relief of Archilochus on another...

...This portal leads to a grand hall with a double stairway whose balustrades are spangled with golden ropework...

...No bubble skylights...

...Confronted with the razzle-dazzle of the high-tech crowd, Britain's classicists have tended to be a little too stiff and self-conscious in their approach— and sometimes just plain silly...

...No dishes (but satellite and terrestrial television cables, together with telephone and utility lines, are compactly channeled to make repair and maintenance less disruptive...

...A few years ago, the prince's widely publicized campaign for humane architecture seemed in colA regular contributor of essays on architecture to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Catesby Leigh is a critic living in Washington, D.C...

...In Britain, however, it seems every old building is a "listed," or landmarked, building...

...Paul's Cathedral that was rebuilt with stark, ugly towers under a 1956 master plan—simply evaporated, allowing developers to substitute a meretricious postmodern alternative...

...A reminder of the benefits of such patronage came last month with the opening of the expanded Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace...

...The four-story building facing Adam's courtyard boasts a striking classical relief in bronze (again by Alexander Stoddart) that runs across the top of the façade...

...A pair of free-standing classical genii bearing torches, also by Stoddart, are perched above stout Doric columns in a lofty portal...

...Cockerell a century and a half ago...

...If you're an architecture school graduate, you have to be really dedicated to go and sit at the feet of John Simpson...

...An interconnected network of winding streets and lanes—a departure from the cul-de-sac paradigm that took hold in both Britain and the United States after World War II—creates picturesque views, while the limited sight-lines force cars to slow down and make the streets more pedestrian-friendly...

...Porphyrios prevailed by a vote of 114 to 2. The traditional design community nevertheless sees itself operating in a hostile cultural environment...

...Most clients haven't much use for visionaries who aspire to erect gigantic upside-down woks...

...This marks a welcome change in the traditional camp...

...No fancy, chalet-style garden sheds...

...Behind the scenes, he helped persuade the millennial building commission to contribute to the conversion of a very fine church with a late medieval nave in Bury St...

...But Britain also has something the United States lacks: royal patronage, which continues—even after Prince Charles's retreat from controversy—to be a vitally important asset to the cause of traditional architecture...

...It seems unlikely Charles could ever again generate the kind of public support for his architectural cause that he did during the late 1980s and early 1990s...

...Its houses sell at a generous premium, architecture critics have had to shelve their knee-jerk "theme park" clichés, and Tony Blair's New Labour government has directed local planning authorities to consider the village a pattern for environmentally sensible town planning...

...A five-story rotunda housing the library stacks is situated behind the pavilion, but on a diagonal...

...Designed by Rogers's office, the dome is a gigantic, glass-fiber object—somewhat like an upside-down Chinese cooking wok— suspended from tilted steel masts...

...In order to commemorate antiquity's achievement, Porphyrios emphasizes those elements of the traditional canon that derive from the construction of early temples in wood—which ends up producing something a little theoretical and rationalized...

...The cost of land in city centers demands tall buildings, he says, and the tall classical office buildings of a century ago he feels were not notably successful (although Daniel Burn-ham's Flatiron Building and McKim Mead and White's Municipal Building in New York, not to mention John T. Windrim's Bell Telephone Building in Philadelphia, suggest the opposite conclusion...

...These undistinguished row-houses are not Cockerell's and should have been demolished to create a less-irregular site for the Sackler...

...Still, so long as he offers an alternative to modernist patronage, he is doing what he can to make people understand that true architecture is not a mere commodity, nor the province of egomaniacs, but one of the noblest, most precious expressions of the human spirit...

...Terry obtained this sumptuous commission from the Crown Estate, whose administrators are appointed by the queen...

...High-quality design schemes are at present relatively scarce," the development's consulting architect, David Oliver, adds...

...The hall's upper level boasts Ionic columns and pilasters whose shafts are coated with scagliola plasterwork that looks like richly veined green marble, with capitals of white stone above...

...On the outside, the gallery complex is a bit academic...

...what's more, Terry placed columns on its Doric porch in front of windows, which is not where they belong...

...Three months later, Princess Diana's death in a car crash sent the prince's already battered public image into a tailspin— and it was his role in the architecture wars that suffered most...

...Perhaps the finest residential work of recent vintage has been done by Julian Bicknell...

...But it's going to take time to recover the kind of architectural culture that can generate such work on a significant scale...

...When John Simpson produced his Paternoster Square redevelopment scheme at Prince Charles's urging, the Evening Standard, sensing that the public was with the prince on this issue, sponsored an exhibition of the scheme in St...

...Designed by John Simpson, the prince's favorite architect, the gallery consists of two new structures erected at right angles and inserted into the already densely built Buckingham Palace complex...

...Edmunds, a town northeast of London, into a cathedral...

...They were espousing the moralizing belief of 'truthful' modernism that the façade must reflect the interior, which is nonsense," says Watkin...

...Students come out of the [modernist] architecture schools unable to draw a building...

...Construction got underway in the depths of a recession, and "the Duchy of Cornwall had to subsidize some of the initial infrastructure costs in order to kick-start the development," says Andrew Hamilton, Poundbury's development director...

...Charles commissioned his architectural eminence grise, Léon Krier, a longtime advocate of traditional urbanism, to draw up a master plan for a four-hundred-acre tract...

...Labour's massive 1997 electoral victory was great news for Blair's pals Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, both leading exponents of flashy "high-tech" design, and the modernist architectural establishment...

...An office tower project presently threatens the most sacrosanct portion of the city's skyline—the portion dominated by the dome of St...

...Terry broke the exteriors of his buildings down into a series of façades that were treated in a variety of styles, ranging from Venetian Gothic to Georgian...

...Add on top of this the preservationists' listing of everything they can get their hands on, and the average architecture-school graduate finds it very hard to be "creative" and make a living...

...Aless-appealing traditional building is Robert Adam's new Sackler Library at Oxford...

...The Institute of Architecture, whose establishment he had promoted, became a shambles (and is now defunct...

...But his sense of proportion, of correct distribution of building masses, is unsurpassed by any architect in Britain or America...

...Bicknell has done plenty of big houses in the English countryside since completing Henbury, but he has yet to carry out a major institutional commission in Britain...

...Though the classical auditorium that forms part of the complex is so understated it scarcely makes an impression (apart from its awkwardly attached little entrance pavilion), this otherwise Gothic quadrangle represents a refreshing departure from the generally depressing drift of Oxford's postwar architecture...

...Like Simpson, however, Terry has developed a lively appreciation for decorative enrichment...

...And at Magdalen College, the student union took a vote between Porphyrios's quadrangle scheme and another by a prominent modernist architect, Ian Ritchie...

...Not surprisingly, the traditional architects in the prince's camp reaped almost no commissions in the millennial building patronage that soaked up $3 billion in lottery funds...

...It is about recovering a humane architectural culture in an era in which art's role in the shaping of the human habitat is far too small...

...Poundbury's list of architectural prohibitions is long...

...lapse...

...No overly elaborate door hoods, least of all the off-the-shelf kind made of plastic...

...This ambitious Gothic project was started after World War II but came to a halt in 1970, before construction on the cathedral's main tower had begun...

...During the 1980s, Quinlan Terry designed a large and very attractive office, retail, and residential complex in Richmond, a densely urbanized London district...

...Poundbury has also worked in practical terms...

...The visitor passes from the little pavilion into a double-height entrance hall dramatically decorated with sculptural friezes by the sculptor Alexander Stoddart...

...The Queen Elizabeth Gate in Hyde Park, erected in 1993, awkwardly combines classical gateposts with the rather preposterous effusion of art-nouveau feuillage of the gates, while the rampant lion and unicorn of the royal coat of arms are rendered as two-dimensional, Babes-in-Toyland cutouts...

...But this is not an exercise in princely largesse...

...Nash was a romantic, and something of a jack-of-all-styles, and Terry's work at the park ranges from a "Goth-ick Villa" after the manner of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill to a sober Regency-style "Doric Villa" decorated with relief panels derived from the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum...

...The eye could use more figurative diversion than he seems willing to provide...

...This ubiquitous, neurotic preservationist impulse is the second bad result of modernism: First the British got those awful Corbusian building-slabs, and then—because of the public's assumption that anything new replacing anything old will be uglier—they got stuck with every piece of architectural flotsam and jetsam antedating the Corbusian flood...

...And there's a baroque "Corinthian Villa" sporting intricately modeled swags and Corinthian capitals with spiral fluting on the column shafts...

...No interlocking concrete roof tiles...

...He also knows where to place ornamental accents...

...Britain has never had a plebiscite on architecture, but every indication of public preference points in tradition's direction...

...Adam's library is entered by way of a circular, glass-roofed pavilion crammed on a narrow street, with a pair of stout Doric columns flanking the door and a heavy entablature above...

...Terry's mentor, Raymond Erith, for example, tended to be quite austere...

...Nash introduced the classical Regency style, and is responsible for the extensive use of white stucco on London façades, having employed it on his terraces, or townhouse blocks, adjacent to Regent's Park...

...Even so, Julian Bicknell, a founding trustee of the prince's Institute of Architecture, says he regards the Institute as "misconceived, precisely because it chose to set up in opposition to the general culture...

...Traditional architects should be making the fullest possible use of Britain's generous supply of skilled craftsmen...

...And largely as a result of this project, Porphyrios has won a commission to design a $100 million Gothic residential college at Princeton...

...Then, too, there's an "Ionic Villa," with exterior decoration that includes a pediment adorned with rinceaux and a pair of rampant elephants flanking a heraldic shield...

...Buildings have to be individually designed because of the complexity of the village's layout and the architectural variety each block is intended to offer...

...Stoddart has also modeled imposing public monuments to Robert Burns, John Wilson, David Hume, and John Witherspoon...

...But meanwhile, more and more work slips away from architects, as clients get the job done with construction engineers and tradesmen...

...Paul's...

...Tiny though it is, Poundbury is at the heart of the prince's struggling cultural counterrevolution...

...He says that in the Dorchester area, housing associations—non-profits that build public housing for rent—have found it easier to borrow money for new projects after investing in well-designed developments...

...The full use of traditional architecture's expressive resources continues to elude some classicists...

...Once the economy recovered, Poundbury became a commercially successful development...

...Paul's Cathedral...

...The quality of the construction and materials is high, and builders can't economize by plopping down uniform "product," as they do in most residential subdivisions...

...Fifteen years ago, Dorchester authorities decided they wanted to extend the city's urban boundary into the prince's Duchy of Cornwall...

...Inside, however, Simpson has risen to the occasion...

...During the 1980s, Bicknell built Henbury Rotunda, a magnificent Palladian villa in Cheshire with freestanding sculpture adorning its four pediments...

...Despite the ignominious defeats Charles has suffered, traditional architects are very busy, while the urban-planning ideas the prince has championed are starting to catch on...

...It must be said that the proportions of a number Terry's buildings— including his Maitland Robinson Library at Downing College, Cambridge, which was completed in 1992—are somewhat cramped and convey a sense of top-heaviness...

...His non-residential projects include a handsome Georgian golf clubhouse and a Shakespeare Country Park with fine, half-timbered buildings—both, significantly, carried out in Japan...

...As in the United States, the most fashionable architects, professors, and almost all of the critics are modernists...

...The public response to Charles's 1988 BBC documentary, A Vision of Britain, in which he called for the restoration of a sense of human scale and amenity to British architecture and urbanism, was enormous...

...Bicknell, along with Terry, is the most conventional of the British classicists...

...Indeed, British classicists believe the key to architectural longevity lies in low elevations, with walls of load-bearing masonry...

...At the library, the cupola contributes to this effect...

...No plastic awnings...

...So, too, the romantic stereotype of the architect as a Promethean genius— a man who invents the terms of his art more or less ex nihilo—has done the profession considerable harm...

...A fiercely nationalistic Scot, Stod-dart has built on Glasgow's rich heritage of classical architecture generously adorned with sculpture...

...If classical architecture didn't become extinct in Britain in the aftermath of World War II, it came close, and what success it currently enjoys is largely attributable to the prince...

...A third, four-story building adjoining the rotunda faces a stark sunken courtyard...

...The dome and its multimedia extravaganza, which cost over a billion dollars, attracted half the people expected after opening on New Year's Eve 1999...

...It was Prince Charles who brought Porphyrios to the attention of Magdalen's president, Anthony Smith...

...Prince Charles's disengagement from the architectural arena was never absolute...

...The queen mother's funeral seems to have reminded Britons that they had forgotten about Diana, despite the unprecedented national plague of lachrymosity that set in after her death...

...You have to be taught...

...In Britain, elite opinion has more sway over cultural life than in the United States...

...With its heavy cornice, narrow upright windows sunk in thick masonry frames, and lack of surface enrichment, the rotunda resembles a stylized donjon...

...Until the architecture schools change, traditional architects will be a tiny minority," says David Watkin, Cambridge architecture historian and author of an excellent diagnosis of the intellectual pathologies riddling academic apologias for modernism, Morality and Architecture...

...It would be hard to find a more beautiful community built in the last half century...

...They think building tall is immoral...

...But its residences—ranging from spacious, detached homes to little row-houses—are built in traditional regional styles with façades of brick, stone, or stucco...