The Prince of Wales has apologised for setting modernist and classical architects at war but warned that a gulf of understanding remains between "top-down" urban reconstruction and those who believe communities have a role to play in design and planning.
In advance of his speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects modernists, who still complain of his "carbuncle" speech 25 years ago, complained he had no right to speak but the Prince urged a level of reconciliation.
He urged an "organic" approach to planning buildings and a break from the "mechanical" or even "genetically modified" architecture of the modern movement.
"Clearly, many people out there who aren't architects, planners, developers or road engineers think about these matters rather differently from the professional mindset," he said.
"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 ten they are never allowed an alternative and they are all forced instead to become part of an on-going experiment."
He urged a new way of working informed by traditional practice as a more integrated way of looking at an alarmingly threatened world.
But he also attacked the comprehensive redevelopment of towns and cities and recalled the profoundly affecting 1960s "experiment" and was part of a larger experiment with our communities, our identity and our sense of belonging which is no longer sustainable.
"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 depersonalized and defaced," he said.
"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."
