Poundbury

Tamir Aharoni Tutor: Ricardo Ruivo Pereira

poundbury

People want beauty around them. And everywhere they are denied it. People may need these things sometimes. But they also want harmony, reassurance, familiarity and beauty.1 (Leon Krier) Poundbury is a 3,000 person village in Southern England, owned by Prince Charles. Although it looks like a Georgian town, it was designed in the 80’s by the Luxembourgian architect Leon Krier. Construction began in 1993 and is still ongoing: it is planned to be completed in 2025, and to double the town’s current population. Prince Charles, widely recognised as a guru, and an enemy of modernist architects, has executed in Poundbury his theories about traditionalist architecture.

The neo-traditional house is the commercial response of builders to regionalist government planning regulations. Regionalist government planning control began as a backlash against characterless “architecture of anywhere”2 (modernist). Are the new vernacular houses architecture of anytime?

Prince Charles wrote A Vision of Britain in 1989. In his book, he states: “We can build new developments which echo the familiar, attractive features of our regional vernacular styles. There are architects who can design with sensitivity and imagination so that people can live in more pleasant surroundings.”3 As such, Poundbury was England’s version to the New Urbanism movement which emerged in the United States in the 80’s. The town reflects Krier’s conception of traditional architecture as a timeless universal form.

The aesthetic outcome of Poundbury is an awkward blend of a haphazard, incoherent, and absurd looking architectural production. The mix and match of styles produced include Georgian, Victorian, Tudor, Edwardian, Arts and Crafts and brick cottages.

The result is alien because the scales are wrong and the construction methods are not traditional. Kenneth Frampton, in Modern Architecture and the Critical Present, criticises neo-traditional architecture: “Superficial historicism can only result in consumerist iconography masquerading as culture.”4 In particular, Poundbury has been criticised for its architecture by many architects and critics: 1.

Liane Lefaivre: “Like other Kitsch works these [houses] feed settings of emotion

and starve [the] rationality – the message can be received without a translation.”5 2.

Stephen Bayley: 2a.

“No expression exists in the architectural vocabulary to describe the depressing

style of Poundbury.”6 2b.

“It is fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute. What can be said about a

presiding intelligence that demands central-heating flues be disguised by cast

concrete gargoyles?”7 2c.

“Why should we hide behind the delusion that excellence only existed in the

past and the best we can do is to ape it?”8 3.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams in New Statesman: “[A]n embarrassing anachronism

as the new century dawns.”9

Photo taken by the AA Photo Library, 1994.

4.

Andy Spain, in ArchDaily: “An over sanitised middle-class ghetto that has a

whiff of resignation that there is nothing positive to live for so we must retreat

to the past.”10 And many others.

The Prince’s philosophy, upon which Poundbury was constructed, includes separate elements that do not necessarily fit alongside one another. One such element is Populism, which argues that most people like old-looking buildings, so experts should not impose modernism against their wishes. Another element is Nostaligism, with a preference for the English classical architecture of roughly 300 years ago. The third is Mysticism which argues that there are deep harmonies in the universe which are reflected in the sort of buildings that the Prince likes.11 The last two elements, which display an appreciation of classical forms and thought, embody a metaphysical harmony of nature and originates from the architectural ideology of the historical period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; Populism is a postmodern addition.

In 2016, Poundbury established its town centre in the form of Queen Mother Square.

If the first phase, built in the early 90’s, was based on a Dorset vernacular style, Queen Mother Square looks like a Roman piazza. Based on Palladio’s Convento della Carità in Venice, the Duchess of Cornwall, Poundbury’s first hotel next door stands in the square.

Queen Mother Square also includes a new Waitrose behind a Doric colonnade, facing the yellow facade of Strathmore House. Strathmore, imitating a European Palace, contains eight luxury apartments. On the sides of the buildings, the columns and capitals are painted on the façades. “It’s the poor man’s choice, but it makes it more poetic,”12 said Quinlan Terry, one of Prince Charles’s favourite architects, who designed most of the buildings around the square alongside his son Francis. The residents of the new square will be anything but poor.13 A 40-metre-high tower now rises above the square, crowned with a domed pavilion and a little bright green pergola which is visible from far away. The local residents tried to stop the building of the new tower because of the landscape impact. Léon Krier, wanted to impact the landscape: “The whole point of a monumental building is to create a landmark. Perhaps it’s an interesting symbol, being luxury flats. After all, that’s the spirit of our time.”14 This is an example illustrating the contradiction between the prince’s populism and his personal love of the type of buildings that he likes: modernism, according to HRH, should not be imposed, and yet the tower was built against the residents’ wishes.

The prince has lamented what he calls the severance of a ‘meaningful relationship’15 to the past and to nature, and blames this loss on the domination of a scientific and technological culture. But Poundbury is an entirely contemporary object. Its traditional look is itself the product of modernity, it is dependent on modern technology for the construction of its imagery. Most of the stone is reconstituted, the traditional facades hide steel frames and blockwork walls, and much of the “metalwork” is painted fibreglass. Even Quinlan Terry, who is known for his hand-drawn illustrations of his design schemes, has utilised the computer to generate his drawings of the new Queen Moth-

Steel frames are used in the construction of Duchess of Cornwall in Queen Mother Square. Photo taken by Diamond Geezer.

Queen Mother Square (painted columns on the side of the apartment building). Photo taken by Ordnance Survey.

Palladio’s Convento della Carità , 1560.

er Square. The Georgian facades are a product of computer-generated design. Queen Mother Square, and Poundbury in general, represent and attempt to create a time and space that is completely alien to the way in which they are designed and constructed.

The village has the aesthetic of the past but without its history. Even the trees are young.

And the map represses its modernity: it is drawn in the aesthetic of an 18th century map.

Modernity, in the Prince’s perspective, has destroyed many architectural and urban virtues of the past. In the Prince’s project of Poundbury, he attempts to resurrect these lost elements in architectural form. It was criticised that the attempt is not a meaningful sense of traditional, but an invention. Rather than representing the past, Poundbury is a fantasy of what is lacking in the present. At times of great crisis the world itself seems to lose its footing. Things that seemed solid are suddenly revealed as provisional, their glues and mortars crumbling. We are caught in this endless state of change. Since the history has always been in constant change, holding to a made-up past is understandable but it is an illusion.

The Duchy cannot be the instrument of experimental notion – it has to be profitable.

And the new development at Dorchester cannot simply be a monument of Royal patronage. It hopes to be an example that other developers will follow and that will have a transforming effect on buildings everywhere. Poundbury’s architecture, as a construction of identity and tradition, influenced developments that came after it. One of them is Tiddy Brook Meadows in Tavistock, South West England: 230 neo-traditional houses, from the 2000’s. The development included modern materials and construction methods with traditional housing forms and external decoration.

Even though there are many good reasons to criticise it, Poundbury does do some things right. It embodies principles which go beyond the Prince’s stylistic taste. It mixes uses, putting offices and workshops in among houses, rather than building them in separate zones. It mixes affordable housing with market housing, so that it is hard to tell the difference between the two. It is built with higher density than typical suburbs, so that it consumes less land and encourages neighbourliness. It promotes pedestrian movement over driving. As such, the Prince succeeded in implementing the urban planning ideas which he declared in A Vision of Britain.

In the same spirit of the New Urbanism design process, a five day charrette was organised which provided an opportunity for the local residents to consult, question and to directly discuss matters concerning the development of the town with a number of architects, planners and the master planner Leon Krier himself.

Despite the picturesque street layout, Krier’s approach is not simply scenographic: it embodies the theories of the 19th-century Viennese architect and planner, Camillo Sitte.

Sitte believed that the old cities which people admired were not happy accidents but were designed according to specific principles. In The Art of Building Cities16, Sitte provided a detailed urban design analysis of streets and squares in old Italian and Northern European cities. “Modern city planning completely reverses the proper relationship

Photo taken by the AA Photo Library, 1994.

between built-up area and open space,” Sitte wrote. “In former times the open spaces—streets and plazas—were designed to have an enclosed character for a definite effect.

Today we normally begin by parcelling out building sites, and whatever is left over is turned into streets and plazas.”17 In Poundbury, the layout of the buildings are determined by the road pattern, not vice versa. Public spaces such as streets and squares have a clear function and shape.

Density Poundbury is conceived as a typical Dorset town with a compact radial shape and a traditional pattern of streets and squares. By designing the plan in this way, Krier attempts to create a self-sufficient, pedestrian-oriented community, offering opportunities for education, employment, shopping and leisure through a review of a traditional Dorset town.

As a model for future extension of British towns, the project is a reaction of the anti-social suburban sprawl of post-war Britain. Christopher Martin wrote that Poundbury “should not be another corner of England given over to charmless sprawl the superstore as its principal focus.”18 This is, in fact, another example of the contradiction in the Prince’s philosophy. In Queen Mother Square, Poundbury’s central square, there is a Waitrose branch. The traditionalist would privilege a small business-laden street, and disapprove of centralised consumption. It conflicts with the expected, popular usage of the city today, and this populist functionalism won out in the city’s plan.

The entire expansion is planned to contain 2,500 houses on 161 hectares of land to be built in four phases in response to market demand. The first phase refers to 500 dwellings, with a density of about 60 dwellings per hectare. This is the density of a traditional Dorset town, achieved with a combination of irregular streets, small gardens, houses built right up to the pavement without front gardens, two and three floors houses and off-street parking lots. The masterplan layout has a compact shape, identifying a clear urban edge’s pattern between the built and the rural area. The main facilities, a pub, a shop, and a market hall, are located in the centre, which provides a clear urban focus for the village. From the centre, the town is developed in a radial way.19 Traffic The town plan is addressed to encourage walking within the village. All the local facilities are within a short distance, less than 200 metres. The project incorporates a radical approach to the motorcar, developed by Alan Baxar Associates. Rather than seeking to exclude traffic, it seeks to civilise the car through the urban layout. Cars are allowed to park and circulate in all the streets, but their impact is minimised. The buildings and urban spaces dictate the form of the roads. The first traffic control strategy is to control the car’s speed by shaping streets to slow down cars: this is achieved by using streets corners and streets of irregular pattern. Car speed is aimed to be kept below 32 km/h by limiting the driver’s perceived acceleration distance, introducing events at regular intervals and using the buildings to define the corners. The drivers have to adjust, not the pedestrians.

The street layout is deliberately chaotic. There are blind bends, no signage - not even

Poundbury’s masterplan, Drawn by Leon Krier in 1988.

stop signs! In the planning of the streets, obstacles are placed every 70 metres to slow cars down; for instance, an octagonal building in the middle of Bridport Road forces drivers to awkwardly skirt the structure and slow down. The front street attached to the buildings provides a wind protected environment for pedestrians. The layout of the streets is determined by the buildings with a variety of urban spaces.20 Still, the progressive attitude to cars has not curbed habits: a survey conducted at the end of the first phase showed that car use was higher in Poundbury than in the surrounding rural district of West Dorset. The free-for-all parking policy, meanwhile, has turned many of the streets and squares into a car park for Dorchester shoppers.

Mix tenures Twenty percent of the housing in Poundbury qualify as affordable housing sprawled within the estate21, and these houses are indistinguishable and well-integrated. While the majority of such housing is social housing, owned by charitable trusts and rented to low-income tenants, there is also shared-equity housing, which allows qualifying buyers to purchase a share in a home, even if they cannot afford a mortgage on the full market value. What is unusual in Poundbury is that the affordable housing is “pepper potted”— that is, scattered, and similar in appearance to its neighbours.

A primary school is also under construction, reflecting the increasing number of young families moving to Poundbury. A residents’ association has been set up to foster the community spirit. In addition, in order to increase the town’s safety, the houses are designed so that one can overlook the streets from the house windows.

Mix use The success of the village’s planning has been achieving mixed use. As well as the medical and veterinary clinics, offices of lawyers and accountants, travel agents and a funeral home, there is a chocolate and cereal factory, a tech company making components for plane wings, and 80 small units for start-up businesses scattered among the porticoes.

Simon Conibear, Poundbury’s development manager, stated that the key to successfully introducing industrial buildings on residential streets is to make sure that they are built before the housing; residents accept a fait accompli, but they strongly resist the introduction of non-residential uses after the fact.22 The ground floors of residential and office buildings are devoted to commercial uses such as shops and cafés. For instance, there is Escalus House, a four-story building with residential units, office space, and retail on the ground floor, located at Queen Mother Square. Poundbury currently has 136 businesses generating 2,100 jobs.23 Poundbury evokes different kind of emotions: it is funny, and uncomfortably nostalgic for a world that never existed, an illusion that is painfully punctured by the steel frames in the half-built buildings. I find depressing the idea that a modern house is built as a half-convincing photocopy of an old one; or that, as we live in a time when large win-

Arial view of Poundbury’s phase one. Photo by Tristotrojka.

dows are easy to achieve, houses in Poundbury have small windows simply in order to appear old; or that bricked-windows are built to imitate historical buildings. Yet peering beyond this, one may see values that we can learn from. Poundbury’s urban planning principles are the consensus. Those who criticise Poundbury focus on the architecture because it is a fun and easy target. They ignore the town’s urban planning because they would agree with its principles. Possibly the critics look at photos of Poundbury and overlook its conventional plan. Perhaps not only the architecture, as it has been criticised, is conservative, but also the urban planning. The notion of affordable housing being indistinguishable from private housing is considered worthy of praise. But are they really built in the same standards as private housing? Is it good that one cannot tell which of the buildings are ‘affordable’?

The framework of the masterplan identifies plots which would be filled in by further development. This process is in contradiction to the evolution of the traditional framework of village or town growth. Future building in Poundbury is predetermined. One would have thought that setting up an infrastructure that doesn’t allow flexibility destroys the valued relationship between people and development. The prince would normally have argued that the long term relationships between the inhabitants and buildings is what gives the community its life. The planning in place at Poundbury forces the user to adapt to the masterplan. Indeed there are many criticisms that Poundbury has a soulless atmosphere, the very criticism which the Prince levels at modernist developments.

In addition to the masterplan, a Poundbury Code was established – a set of regulations and rules which govern not only the planning and design of Poundbury but the architecture and residents24. The regulations determine how buildings should face the street, the amount of setback from the street, the buildings’ relationship to each other, requirements for out buildings, parking, and building heights. It also determines the materials, techniques, and architectural configurations of roofs, orders allowed (Doric or Tuscan), and placement of doors and window proportions. The Code in Poundbury is used to favour only one form or architectural expression.

What is the relation between Poundbury’s architecture and its urban plan? Prince Charles and Leon Krier see “leaning from the past” not as a nostalgic gesture or sign of a lack of imagination, but rather the recognition that the established vernacular offers the best chance for creating the variety that produces a coherent urban environment and a recognisable sense of place. Thus, Poundbury rejects modernist architecture and urban planning: ‘it was planned from the outset that in Poundbury there would be a mix of the truly vernacular and the ‘high art’ of classical features’25 The aesthetic outcome of Poundbury is an awkward blend of incoherent and absurd looking architectural production. It mixes high and low, classical and vernacular, brick facades that conceal modern construction, and uses signs and symbols in architecture. David Lowenthal’s criticism of postmodernist architecture applies to Poundbury: “treating the Past as a spare-parts warehouse, using Moshe Safdie’s phrase, they select historical motifs out of context and in ignorance or defiance of their origins and relationships.”26

Designed by Ben Pentreath, one of the architects who have been engaged in producing replica Georgian terraces and quaint country cottages.

But could Poundbury be considered postmodern? Does it have the same relationship to the past as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and James Sterling? I would guess that Robert and Denise would enjoy Poundbury but their attitude towards the past is much more ironic. Poundbury is not meant to be complex and contradictory, in the eyes of the prince, rather, it is trying to be coherent. This partially has to do with The Code, where items of human habitation such as clothes driers and dust bins are abolished. The prince treats Poundbury like a national trust historic conservation site. Postmodernism, I would argue, is fundamentally forward looking, even if it uses the past to move forward. Poundbury, on the other hand, as intended by the Prince, is facing the past. Does it matter what they intended? Their intentions might not be ironic but the result could be read in this way?

Urbanism, today, is seen as a natural phenomenon. It is a force that has its own truth.

It seems that, as with attempts to regulate the free market, any method of preplanning a city will fail. The core issue of Poundbury’s plan, I would argue, is that it is static – it has trouble incorporating further development. It hasn’t reached that stage yet, so this is inevitably speculative. Yet an illuminating example is the preplanning of industry before housing. What will happen when a new industry appears? Robert and Denise’s research is about incorporating changes in use and popular spontaneity into architecture, as opposed to what they see as excessively prescribed modern planning. They would enjoy Poundbury as a case-study, reading it ironically as an example of modernist planning gone the other way around. Poundbury has elements of modern planning, in its quest for wholeness, and elements of postmodern planning, in its quest for flexibility. And the two don’t match. The prince’s contradicting philosophy is translated into an attempt to avoid conflict and politics, and to altogether avoid change. While the town pretends to grow naturally, the Eclectic compositions of bits are pre-designed. Poundbury’s flexibility is a prescribed model of flexibility to remain itself unaltered. Poundbury does not only plan its own mess, but aims to be a model for future extension of British towns.

Photo taken by the AA Photo Library, 1994.

Martin, Christopher and Papadaks, Andreas. Prince Charles and the Architectural Debate, London: Academy Editions, 1989, P.12.

2 Maudlin, Daniel. Constructing Identity and Tradition: Englishness, Politics and the Neo-Traditional House, Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 63, Vernacular in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Oct., 2009, pp. 51-63.

3 Prince of Wales, Charles. A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture, London: Doubleday, 1989, P.15.

4 Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture and the Critical Present, London: Architectural Design, 1982, P.77.

5 Lefaivre, Liane and Tzoni, Alexander. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, London: Prestell Publishing, 2003, P. 19.

6 Bayley, Stephen. I’ll show you a real carbuncle, Charles, The Guardian, 7 Dec 2008.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Aldersey-Williams, Hugh. Dorchester Chroncles, New Statesman, 29 Nov 1999.

10 Spain, Andy. Poundbury: Architectural Shame with Worthy Aim, Archdaily, 29 Aug 2010.

11 Moore, Rowan. The shape of Britain to come… as designed by Prince Charles, The Guardian, 24 Jun 2011.

12 Wainwright, Oliver. A royal revolution: is Prince Charles’s model village having the last laugh?, The Guardian, 27 Oct 2016.

13 Flats in Strathmore House have sold for over £750,000. Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Prince of Wales, Charles and Juniper, Tony. Harmony, London: Harper, 2010, P. 25.

16 Sitte, Camillo. The Art of Building Cities: City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals, translated by Stewart, Charles, Martino Fine Books, 2013.

17 Ibid. P.55 18 Martin, Christopher and Papadaks, Andreas. Prince Charles and the Architectural Debate, London: Academy Editions, 1989, P.13.

19 Bondonio, Andrea. Compact City in the UK: Three case studies, Architectural Association – Environment and Energy Programme, 2000, pp. 30-34.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Wainwright, Oliver. A royal revolution: is Prince Charles’s model village having the last laugh? ,The Guardian, 27 Oct 2016.

23 Rybczynki, Wilton. Behind the Façade of Prince Charles’s Poundbury, Architect Magazine, 3 Dec 2013.

24 The architectural and urban regulations on the Code were created by the New Urbanist planners Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) 25 Hardy, Dennis. Poundbury: The Town that Charles Built, London: Town and Country Planning Association, 2006, P.41.

26 Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, 1985, P. 383.

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