Blenheim Estate signs up to the Prince’s Foundation’s
principles of responsible home building
19 JUL 2018 ARTICLE
Blenheim Estate is joining forces with other large estates
to champion the need for responsible housing development.
The Oxfordshire Estate is applying the principles created by
The Prince’s Foundation, which state that landowners have a moral and social
responsibility to build new homes that their communities actually want and that
landowners can do this best by exercising control over how their land is
developed.
In its ‘Building a Legacy – A Landowner’s Guide to Popular
Development’ the Foundation reports: ‘With the right advice, commitment and
resale values, the landowner has the choice of rejecting normal development
models and ensuring their legacy is one of good stewardship, land husbandry and
a moral concern for the quality of life for future generations’.
“The government has stated that nationally we need to be
building 300,000 new homes annually for the foreseeable future in order to
address the growing housing crisis and Oxfordshire in particular is suffering
from a severe under delivery in recent years,” said Roger File, Chief Operating
Officer and Property Director for Blenheim Estate.
“As an organisation we are fortunate enough to be in the
unique position of having access to land suitable for development as well as
both the experience and the expertise to develop and build high quality homes
and communities,”
“Unlike many commercial property developers, we are
inextricably linked to our local communities and we have a strong sense of
responsibility for the socio-economic and aesthetic wellbeing of the area.
“We want to be able to share best practice, enhance our
local communities and create developments we can be proud of and that people
want to live in,” he added.
Building a Legacy makes the case that it’s not enough to
just be building new homes but to be building new places that communities
actually want.
Blenheim Estate is currently developing with Partners Pye
Homes 300 houses on a site to the east of the historic town of Woodstock, where
it will be applying the Foundation’s Building a Legacy principles to ensure
housing is of the right quality and popular locally.
“Our housing and other development initiatives pre-date the
drawing up of our 10 year goals but they are a crucial element in its success,”
said Roger.
“They will help us meet the challenges we have set ourselves
including our Affordable Housing delivery, Restoration of the World Heritage
Site as well as creating an Endowment to ensure its long term sustainability
and, to some extent, our Charitable goals,” he added.
A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales for the R.I.B.A. Trust
Annual Lecture, London
12 MAY 2009 https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speech/speech-hrh-prince-wales-riba-trust-annual-lecture-london
Nowadays we might, perhaps, more accurately speak of “the
young men who imitate the Parthenon – or who are, at any rate, beginning to
value the lessons of history once again – and the old gentlemen who create
abstract designs”, but the underlying message remains the same. If we can find
the right path, perhaps you would care to accompany me to the middle of the
maze?!
Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, I suspect the only
reason I find myself here today is because your President, Sunand Prasad, who
was a student of Keith Critchlow who founded my School of Traditional Arts,
invited me. I felt I should oblige him. I daresay he may be regretting his
invitation by now… as if the media are to be believed – it is a wonder to find
this hall seemingly fully occupied!
But it is, after all, the Royal Institute of British
Architects’ 175th anniversary – on which I can only offer you my sincere
congratulations – and it does seem that a tradition is emerging whereby I am
asked to join you in celebrating a significant anniversary every 25 years. In
another 25 years I shall very likely have shuffled off this mortal coil and so
those of you who do worry about my inconvenient interferences won’t have to do
so any more – unless, of course, they prove to be hereditary!
Now there is something I’ve been itching to say about the
last time I addressed your Institute, in 1984; and that is that I am sorry if I
somehow left the faintest impression that I wished to kick-start some kind of
“style war” between Classicists and Modernists; or that I somehow wanted to
drag the world back to the eighteenth century. All I asked for was room to be
given to traditional approaches to architecture and urbanism, so I am most
gratified to see that, since then, the R.I.B.A. itself has initiated a Group
for traditional practitioners.
To my mind, that earlier speech also addressed a much more
fundamental division than that between Classicism and Modernism: namely the one
between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to architecture. Today, I’m sorry
to say, there still remains a gulf between those obsessed by forms (and
Classicists can be as guilty of this as Modernists, Post-Modernists, or
Post-Post-Modernists), and those who believe that communities have a role to
play in design and planning.
For millennia before the arrival of the modern architect,
human intervention in the environment often managed to be beautiful,
irrespective of stylistic concerns, because the “deep structure” of those
interventions was consonant with a natural order, and therefore generated an
organic, Nature-like order in the built world. And this is not just ancient
history: as I recently pointed out in another context, there is still an echo
of this sort of intervention to be found in so-called “slum cities”, such as Dharavi
in Mumbai, where the work of Joachim Arputham and the Slum Dwellers’
Federation, whom I met there in 2006, has so well demonstrated the power of
community action.
I hope we can avoid any such misunderstanding this evening
of what I have to say – and to be helpful I propose to speak of “organic”
rather than Classical or Traditional architecture. I know that the term
“organic architecture” acquired a certain specific meaning in the twentieth
century (as I was reminded only a few days ago when I visited Erich
Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm on the hills near Potsdam), but perhaps it is time to
recover its older meaning and use it to describe traditional architecture that
emerges from a particular environment or community – an architecture bound to
place not to time. In this way we might defuse the too-easy accusation that
such an approach is “old-fashioned”, or not sufficiently attuned to the
zeitgeist.
This term “organic architecture” might also serve to
distinguish what I am talking about from the “mechanical”, or even
“genetically-modified”, architecture of the Modernist experiment – about which
I will have more to say shortly…
Geoffrey Scott, writing as the First World War broke out,
was most eloquent about the way in which buildings can mirror our selves: “the
centre of Classical architecture”, he wrote, “is the human body… the whole of
architecture is, in fact, unconsciously invested by us with human movements and
human moods … We transcribe architecture in terms of ourselves.” In this sense,
and above all in today’s world, it is surely worth reminding ourselves that
Nature herself is a living organism; Man is a living organism, each of us a
microcosm of the whole – mind, body and spirit. Because of this, what we refer
to as “Tradition”, and the architecture that flows from it, is a symbolic
reflection of the order, proportion and harmony found within Nature and
ourselves.
There are equivalents to this in non-Western traditions
also. In traditional Islamic architecture geometry is understood in ways both
quantitative and qualitative, the combination of the two reflecting the complex
order of Nature: its quantitative dimension regulated the broad form and
construction of a building; its qualitative Nature established the more
discrete proportions of architectural form. In this way the relationship
between the architect and the surrounding world was one based more on reverence
than arrogance; and both quantity and quality were each given their due
attention.
Clearly, many people “out there” who aren’t architects,
planners, developers or road engineers think about these matters rather
differently from the professional mindset. When you provide them with an
alternative vision based on the qualities represented by a living tradition,
and with the quantitative element playing a more subservient role, people tend
to vote with their feet. But the trouble is that nine times out of 10 they are
never allowed an alternative, and they are all forced instead to become part of
an ongoing experiment.
So I wonder if it might be possible to construct a series of
seminars held jointly by this Institute and my Foundation for the Built
Environment to explore whether we could ever come up with a more integrated way
of looking at our alarmingly threatened world; one which is informed by
traditional practice, and by traditional attitudes to the natural world?
After all, Nature, traditionally understood, is far, far
more than a simple source-book of forms. One of the most important series of
books of recent times, in my view – Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order
– is both a compendium of living patterns seen in Nature, absorbed over
millennia into human traditions of building, and a brave search for the
underlying principles that give rise to these patterns everywhere we look. It
reveals, as well as anything can, why we can often recognize Nature, and our
own reflection more readily in a classical column, or in a humble farm building
well-constructed, than in some glitzy new waveform warehouse. There have been
architectural form languages and pattern languages practised over millennia
that nourished humanity, and sustained human society, just as much as did our
spoken languages.
But, still, we cannot entirely blame architects who think
that mere imitations of Nature are sufficient: it is one of the legacies of the
long Modernist experiment that we find ourselves so cut off from the real pulse
of the natural world. To quote from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s foreword
to its recent exhibition on Modernism: “Modernists … believed in technology as
the key means to achieve social improvement, and in the machine as a symbol of
that aspiration.” In many ways this emphasis on technology has brought us
“social improvement”, and many significant benefits, but the side-effects
caused by quite unnecessarily losing our balance and discarding and denigrating
every other element apart from the technological are now becoming more and more
apparent.
Perhaps we ought not to forget that Modernism was an urban
movement. It did not arise in rural areas and I very much doubt that it could
have done so. For Modernism largely rejected the influence of Nature on design.
It preferred abstract thinking to contact with the patterns and organic
ordering of Nature. Indeed, the exploiting of abstract concepts soon became the
hallmark of Modernist architecture. The problem for us today is that this
approach now lies at the heart of our perception of the world.
In so many areas, the only serious goals seem to be greater
efficiency, inducing ever more economic growth, and increasing profits. Not to
achieve these goals is to be marked down as a failure. The trouble is, these
goals were only ever going to be possible if the apparent clutter and
inefficiency of traditional thinking was swept away. It was only ever going to
be possible if the bio-diversity in Nature was reduced to a much more
manageable mono-culture. And it was only ever going to be possible if the inner
world of humanity – our intuition, our instinct – was ignored, or over-ridden.
Instead, we conform more readily to the limited and linear
process of the machine. Such is our conditioned way of thinking along purely
empirical, rational lines that we now seem prepared to test the world around us
to destruction simply to attain the required “evidence base” to prove that that
is what we are indeed doing. And then, of course, it is all too late for the
Sorcerer's Apprentice to summon back the Master to cast the necessary spell to
restore harmony and balance.
Nature, I would argue, reveals the universal essence of
creation. Our present preoccupation with the individual ego, and desire to be
distinctive, rather than “original” in its truest sense, are only the more
visible signs of our rejection of Nature. In addition, there is our addiction
to mechanical rather than joined-up, integrative thinking, and our instrumental
relationship with the natural world. In the world as it is now, there seems to
be an awful lot more arrogance than reverence; a great deal more of the ego
than humility; and a surfeit of abstracted ideology over the practical
realities linked to people’s lives and the grain of their culture and identity.
Over the past 100 years, I think we might possibly agree
that the old way of doing things literally fragmented and deconstructed the
world into a series of “zoned” parts, without any inter-relationship or order
such as is found in Nature. The difficulty I face, however, in asking you to
consider the Modernistic approach of the twentieth century as flawed, and
needing to be replaced, is that, clearly, this fragmented approach has produced
so many great benefits. It is, however, hard to square these benefits with all
the evidence that tells us that if we continue with “business as usual” we will
fail to solve, indeed we are likely to compound, the deeply complicated and
serious problems that this approach has already created. I feel that our
philosophical response and our spiritual response to this problem are just as
important as our empirical one. Empiricism does not deal with meaning, so if we
rely upon it to undo all the wreckage we have caused, it will not be enough –
because it can only reveal the mechanism of things. I know, by the way, that
many contemporary architects agree with this critique of the flaws in the
modern movement philosophy. Just as I know that a considerable number produce
some very interesting and worthy buildings. In fact, two which I have seen
recently are I. M. Pei’s new museum of Islamic Art in Doha, and David
Chipperfield’s remarkable restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin which I saw
two weeks ago.
And if we are to respond philosophically and spiritually, as
well as empirically, architecture is uniquely placed to help us do that. This
is why, faced by such a broad range of interlinked challenges, I would like to
suggest that members of this Institute might consider this question of
refocusing and changing our perceptions and thus help change the course of our
approach.
Let me point out that I don’t go around criticizing other
people’s private artworks. I may not like some of them very much, but it is
their business what they choose to put in their houses. However, as I have said
before, architecture and the built environment affect us all. Architecture
defines the public realm, and it should help to define us as human beings, and
to symbolize the way we look at the world; it affects our psychological
well-being, and it can either enhance or detract from a sense of community. As
such, we are profoundly influenced by it: by the presence, or absence, of
beauty and harmony. I don’t think it is too much to say that beauty and harmony
lie at the heart of genuine sustainability. I believe that precisely because
the built environment defines the public, or civic, realm it should express
itself through the fundamental ingredients that define a genuine civilization –
in other words, those civic virtues such as courtesy, consideration and good
manners.
It was when I was a teenager in the 1960’s that I became
profoundly aware of the brutal destruction that was being wrought on so many of
our towns and cities, let alone on our countryside, and that much of the urban
realm was becoming de-personalized and defaced. The loss was immense,
incalculable – an insane “Reformation” that, I believe, went too far,
particularly when so much could have been restored, converted or re-used, with
a bit of extra thought, rather than knocked down.
I suspect that there are few among you here this evening who
would now try to defend such things as the soulless housing estates that
characterized that time. Albeit that they were pursued with the best possible
motive. One of the problems that I think needs to be acknowledged is that so
often we find the kinds of communities that work best cannot be built, due to
the specialised and reductive nature of the modern planning process. The design
standards imposed by the highway engineering profession, for instance, are particularly
damaging to community as they ensure the dominance of the motor vehicle over
the pedestrian, even within the neighbourhood. If I may say so, your profession
could be of great help with this challenge of converting the planning and
engineering professions, as surely you have noticed that the well-proportioned
neighbourhoods of the Georgian and Victorian era hold their value far better
than the monocultural housing estates of the past 50 years.
Indeed, compare these current rules with those established
centuries ago right here, around Portland Place, by the Howard de Walden and
Portland Estates. Those rules were intended to make good neighbours of us all –
in regard to heights, rhythms and materials of building – and it is because of
these firm and universal rules that this Institute can today enjoy being in
such an enviable headquarters building. And who, looking at the sheer
exuberance and inventiveness of 66 Portland Place, could argue that such rules
inhibit creativity?
The organic/traditional approach – based on sensible
“rules-of-thumb” rather than the more detached and bureaucratic way of ruling
“by the book” – is a living thing, which doesn’t deserve to be called
“old-fashioned”. It is better described as a process of continuous renewal – like
those Japanese temples which are ever-renewed, yet remain ever themselves; or
our – in my case rapidly ageing – bodies for that matter, the cells of which
are continually replaced without replacing the thing that makes us uniquely us.
And, as this very building testifies, Tradition has space for as much
creativity as we can bring to it. The historian, F.A. Simpson – whom I remember
well when I was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge and he was a
very senior Fellow – once wrote that “the mind of Man can range unimaginably
fast and far, while riding to the anchor of a liturgy.”
My School of Traditional Arts, in Shoreditch, works hard to
inspire its many students not just to copy the patterns of the past, but to
conjure their own interpretations of traditional patterning by keeping within
the overriding discipline of the grammar of its geometry. This is essential,
for even wisdom can die if it is allowed to become mere mechanical repetition,
devoid of love or any real understanding. Unfortunately, however, the culture
of architecture schools in general still overwhelmingly encourages students to
focus on the exciting and the new, at the expense of the truly “original” –
which should always point to our common origins – and of evidence-based lessons
of history and place. Indeed, traditional buildings and projects are still
looked down on today by most teachers; too often dismissed out of hand as
"pastiche" or worse. The sad truth, I feel, is that virtually all
Schools of Architecture and Planning have persisted in teaching an approach
which is deliberately counter-intuitive to the human spirit and to the
underlying patterns of Nature herself of which, whether we like it or not, we
are a microcosm. By so doing they have deliberately thrown away the book of
grammar that contained, as it were, the “syntax of civic virtues.” It was
because of this situation that I founded my original Institute of Architecture,
to be succeeded by my Foundation for the Built Environment which is soon to
launch an MSc in Sustainable Urbanism Development at Oxford. It will be an
inter-disciplinary post-professional degree and, in addition to that, my
Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship in Sustainable Urbanism and Architecture is
entering its second year, along with an expanding Traditional Building Craft
Apprenticeship Scheme.
Since the 1960s I have gradually become convinced that the
“experiment” on our towns and cities that had such a profoundly negative effect
on me at that time – and not just on me, I can assure you – is only a small
part of a much larger experiment that touches every aspect of our lives.
I don’t believe I am the only one to mind about this; nor
the only one to feel that the giant experiment (which has been unfolding at
increasing pace over the last half-century) with our built environment, with
our communities, with our identity, with our very sense of belonging, has gone
too far and that it is no longer sustainable in the circumstances in which we
now find ourselves.
The fact that these circumstances are in some ways a natural
consequence of this larger experiment – being conducted in all walks of life –
needs, I think, to be recognized and stated plainly. The trouble is that very
few people dare to call it into question, for the very good reason that if they
do they find themselves abused and insulted, accused of being “old-fashioned,”
out of touch, reactionary, anti-progress, even anti-science – as if it was some
kind of unholy blasphemy to question the state of our surroundings, of our
natural environment, our food security, our climate and our own human identity
and meaning. Little wonder, then, that most people shy away from pointing out
that the Emperor isn’t actually wearing very many clothes anymore.
The crisis in the banking and financial sector – devastating
though its consequences will be for some – has at least brought to light
something of the short‑termist, unsustainable, and experimental nature of the
way many professionals now operate in the world; a kind of surpassing
cleverness in the devising of products and systems that no-one really
understands. At a time when, believe it or not, we are hearing calls for a
return to old‑fashioned, traditional banking virtues, might these
calls not apply equally to the manner in which our built environment gives
physical expression to the way we do business and live our lives, as
essentially social beings?
Nothing argues for a re-evaluation of our way of doing
things more than the state of the planet. Some twenty years ago – shortly after
I made A Vision of Britain – I made another B.B.C. film called Earth in Balance
in which I interviewed the then Senator Al Gore. I don’t think many people paid
much attention to that film. It’s amusing watching it now! His subsequent
bestseller, Earth in the Balance, played an important part in framing the
debate before the Kyoto Conference on climate change. At that time, I argued
that a rebalancing of priorities from short- to long-term was needed and that
short-term thinking was at the root of the environmental crisis. I may have
thought that then – I am convinced of it now! Sustainability matters.
Durability matters even more. And perhaps more than ever, it matters now; for
surely it must be true that the twin crunches of credit and climate together
have highlighted the dangers of the short-term view – “consume today and let
someone else pay tomorrow for the throwaway society.”
As over 60 per cent of our carbon emissions can be
attributed to the built environment, all of us who are involved with the making
of place have a great responsibility. Climatologists speak, and speak urgently,
of the need to flatten the curve of rising emissions – starting now.
Not only that, but the great irony is that many of the
social challenges we hoped economic growth would solve still remain deeply
resistant to resolution, even after so many years of “growth”. Experience now
tells us that poverty, stress, ill-health and social tensions could not have
been ended by economic growth alone. At the heart of this dilemma is the issue
of global urbanization, as more than sixty per cent of the world’s population
will live in cities by 2030. And what kind of cities will they find themselves
inhabiting? The primary response so far to this accelerating urbanization has
been to view it as a short-term challenge of scale, and to respond to it by
building bigger, more and faster, rather than questioning whether and to what
extent such development – still based on an outmoded paradigm of planning and
design – is actually sustainable, economically, socially and environmentally.
Some, at least, are beginning to regard the growth of shanty-towns – a
highly-visible consequence of rapid urbanization – as more than just a nuisance
that needs to be cleared away, in the same way as the “slums” of our British
cities were cleared in the 1960s, but as a possible clue to how we might
respond better to growth in the future – from the bottom up.
The trouble is that we seem to have become programmed to see
the individual elements of a problem only in isolation – which means that,
often, in curing one problem we create many more. We see this way of thinking
only too clearly in those flashy new buildings where just by adding a windmill,
some solar panels, or other such “bling” to a high-rise glass tower it is
considered to make everything “green”. My Foundation has always been committed
to finding a more integrated approach to greening building, inspired by traditional
environments in which even such things as the alternate planting and paving of
courtyards – encouraging the movement of air, so obviating the need for
air-conditioning – and the clever placing of verandas or porticos, can make a
building greener. The Foundation’s Natural House, now under construction at the
Building Research Establishment’s Innovation Park, is an attempt to introduce a
new model for green building that is site-built, low-carbon and easily adapted
for volume building. It remains, however, recognizably a house. It doesn’t wear
its “green-ness” as if it was the latest piece of haute couture; it is much
more concerned with what works on the High Street in terms of good manners and
courtesy.
I must say, I find it baffling that we still consider
“whole-istic” thinking to be a kind of alternative New Age therapy when, in
fact, to see things in the round and take account of the impact upon the whole
is the only effective way of addressing the many, seemingly intractable
problems we now face, especially if we hope to solve them without compounding
our troubles with yet more chaos and destruction. More and more of the world’s
problems seem interconnected, so it would be wise, would it not, to consider –
in architecture as much as in any other field – the wider implications of our
actions rather than constantly narrowing our focus and reducing our ambitions
down to the one element and its one outcome. Yet this is the way we have tended
to operate ever since it became the conventional way of thinking about the
world.
It seems to me that the only way to tackle this narrowness
of vision is through collaborations across disciplines and divides. Your
current President has encouraged your Institute to take an active role in
addressing climate change in the run up to the Copenhagen conference, and if
there is a compelling reason for my own Foundation to cooperate with you in the
future it surely has to be around causes such as this. I can only say that
along with many others I look forward to seeing a new, binding and fair treaty
to emerge from the Copenhagen conference.
In bringing such matters to bear upon buildings and places,
what is needed, it seems to me, is a three-stage approach: first, a grounding
in precedent, building upon what has worked well in the past; second, an
understanding of locality, the specific “D.N.A.”, if you like, of a place,
incorporating local intelligence and community input; and third, the
incorporation of the best of new technology.
As an enthusiastic proponent of “Seeing is Believing,” I
realized 20 years ago that I myself had an opportunity to “give room” to an
alternative way of doing things. I set out to try to embody these principles in
the development – undertaken by the Duchy of Cornwall, under the guidance of the
master-planner, Leon Krier – of an area on the edge of the town of Dorchester.
There, over recent years – and increasingly on other sites owned or part-owned
by the Duchy – I have sought to follow what I regard as a golden rule: which is
“to try to do to others as you would have them do to you”; in other words not
to build something that I would not be willing to live in or near myself. The
other day an architect friend of mine asked “How many Pritzker Prizewinners are
not living in beautiful Classical Homes?”; and we all know what he was getting
at. Surely architects flock in such numbers to live in these lovely old houses
– many from the eighteenth century, often in the last remaining conservation
areas of our towns and cities that haven’t yet been destroyed – because, deep
down, they do respond to the natural patterns and rhythms I have been talking
about, and feel more comfortable in such harmonious surroundings – even though,
presumably, they don’t all feel the need to wear togas to do so?!
Poundbury has challenged contemporary models for road design
by introducing shared spaces, and designing for the pedestrian first, and only
then the car; and it has challenged the conventional model of zoned development
by pepper-potting affordable and private-market housing, and integrating
workplaces and retail within a walkable neighbourhood. Thus we can enhance
social and environmental value, as well as commercial. Why on earth all this
should be considered “old-fashioned” and out of touch, when we took the greatest
trouble to sit down and consult with the local community twenty years ago, is
beyond me – for we find, so often, that communities have the best answers
themselves if they can be engaged in a meaningful way. My Foundation has
discovered this time and again in conducting planning exercises in places as
far afield as China and Saudi Arabia. For what is tradition but the accumulated
wisdom and experience of previous generations, informed by intuition and human
instinct, and given shape under the unerring eye of the craftsman, whose common
sense provides the organic durability we so urgently need?
I pray that a new and developing relationship between this
Institute and my Foundation for the Built Environment can enable us to work
together to create the kind of organic architecture for the twenty-first
century that not only reflects the intuitive needs, aspirations and cultural
identity of countless communities around the world, but also the innate
patterns of Nature. As Sir John Betjeman wrote with such prescience back in
1931 – “The Revolting phrase ‘The Battle of Styles,’ wherein architecture is
now considered a fighting ground between old gentlemen who imitate the
Parthenon and brilliant young men who create abstract designs, can only have
been coined by stupid extremists of either side. There is no battle for the
intelligent artist,” he wrote. “The older men gradually discard superfluities.
The younger men do not ignore the necessary devices of the past. Both sides
find their way slowly to the middle of the maze whose magic centre is
tradition.”
Nowadays we might, perhaps, more accurately speak of “the
young men who imitate the Parthenon – or who are, at any rate, beginning to
value the lessons of history once again – and the old gentlemen who create
abstract designs”, but the underlying message remains the same. If we can find
the right path, perhaps you would care to accompany me to the middle of the
maze?!
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