I feel the need for a little rant. I’m quite passionate about design, as you may have noticed from my previous entries. One of my personal bugbears is the dumbing-down one-size-fits-all nonsense of contemporary architecture. We are in severe danger of becoming the first generation since before Victoria which will not leave any architectural legacy - do we really want to be remembered for ‘little boxes, made of ticky-tacky, little boxes, all the same’, as Malvina Reynolds put it? The planners are hamstrung by government policy which seems to insist that innovation is suppressed, technology to be resisted, design flair something which is only suitable for one-off, look-at-me show-off projects.

We should remember that a square double-fronted symmetrical house was in Georgian times a massive technological innovation, brought about by revolutionary brick-making techniques which established a consistent, affordable and above all square brick. For the existing population in wood-framed dwellings this was extraordinary - even more so when coupled with newfangled sash windows. Worth travelling to see and marvel at.

The Victorian and Edwardian terrace, Edwardian villa, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco townhouses, between-the-wars semi and garden village estate, post-war prefab, sixties and seventies concrete brutalist block - whether or not they were ergonomically and socially effective, they defined their generation. Since then, what? Timber frame identikit. For which we are bulldozing brick terraces - which, ludicrously, would have outlasted the soulless estates with which we are replacing them.

All of this makes me pretty chuffing annoyed with the Prince of Wales’ interference with Lord Rogers’ Chelsea Barracks proposal. I admire much about Charles, don’t get me wrong: the Prince’s Trust is a visionary organisation, and I suppose we must now praise his foresightedness regarding organic food production and so on, but for him to circumvent the planning system and use the old-princes-network to get contemporary architectural development quashed in favour of hideous neo-Classicist Quinlan Terry pastiche is unforgivable. Yeah, sure, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani could have ignored him and let the planning system perform its function, but in the real world of course he wasn’t going to. If Charlie says he’d rather you didn’t, then you don’t. Not if you want to continue diversifying your industry so that you have something to fall back on when the oil runs out; you need friends like Charles.

The Prince’s intervention is disgraceful, not just because it is an abuse of position (which it plainly appears to be), but because it is an act of extreme aesthetic Ludditism. I cannot understand how someone who professes to be taking such a long term view on issues so important to society can be so anchored in the design past. Pastiche is just garnish - it has no substance and no purpose. Should we return to mock-Tudor commuter estates? What he completely fails to understand is that the argument cannot be between neo-classical and modern architecture, but between good architecture and bad. He seems to think that these arguments are synonymous, which is so naïve it’s laughable. As it goes, I didn’t really like Lord Rogers’ proposal, aesthetically, but we must remember that he was working to a brief from the Qatari Royal Family which seemed to be trying to get a quart into a pint pot, no doubt under financial pressure, with the result that it seems overdeveloped. That he managed to get architectural merit into the individual buildings and some sort of cohesion into the scheme as a whole is testament enough to his skill. It should always have been up to the planning process to decide whether it was acceptable.

As The Times put it : ‘Those who buy new buildings … are the rightful arbiters of our landscape. It takes courage for an architect to stand up to the monarch-in-waiting. But in an enlightened modern democracy, should one be put in a position to have to do so?’

Post Script: I've just learned that a number of the largest and most high-profile developers routinely pass their proposals to the Prince for approval / comment before they submit them. Whaaaat? Has he become some sort of parallel planning process now? Is he the adjudicator of public taste? I hereby call on all those developers to pass their projects to me for approval before submission too. I'm an equally large part of the democratic process, and I actually have some training in, and make my living from, designing the built environment. I look forward to talking to you all.