Vox Populi

"A lot of fuss about the Prince of Wales, with a group of architects writing to the Guardian claiming HRH's objections to the Chelsea Barracks design is an interference 'in the democratic process.' This is hypocritical rubbish. Architects have always had scant regard for democracy and as often as not have the planners in their pocket; anyone who stands up to them gets my vote, including the Prince of Wales." - Alan Bennett
I have some sympathy for Bennett's viewpoint, although I find Prince Charles too enamored of genre buildings. (Peter Davey had an article in Architectural Review some years ago that showed how what the Prince values could also be achieved in a modernist idiom.) Are architects undemocratic? I think it's more accurate to say that urban-scale development is often so - and tipped against the immediate interests of the community, although architects will argue that they're defending a better future. I do sympathize with the Prince's interest in tradition. The legal theorist Friedrich Hayek believed that it's a safeguard against the kind of casual, cooked-up tyranny that politicians go in for when their vote is in play and money can be made dispensing it. I tend to blame them first. However puffed up they may be, architects are usually somewhere down the line. (Bennett's diary, well worth reading, appears quarterly (?) in the London Review of Books; this one is from 7 January 2010, pages 34-35.)

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