A Vision of Britain; A Personal View of Architecture

London: Doubleday, 1989. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. Ric Gemmell (Cover photograph). The format is approximately 11.75 inches by 9.25 inches. 160 pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations (many in color). Index. DJ has some sear and soiling. This is a somewhat large and heavy item and if shipped outside of the United States will require additional shipping charges. The contents include an Introduction, A Vision of Britain, Ten Principles, and Conclusion. The future King Charles III makes a personal plea for urban development that preserves the unique character and tradition of towns and cities, arguing that architecture serves the aesthetic and practical needs of the average citizen. The Prince of Wales gives his views on the buildings in the United Kingdom. Before the book was released, a BBC documentary was made called HRH Prince Of Wales: A Vision Of Britain. In the documentary the Prince visited buildings in the UK including Birmingham City Centre and gave his views on the buildings. Derived from an article found on-line. If you want to understand King Charles III, and his strong views on human desire and drain pipes, on social order and painted doors, Poundsbury is the place. The monarch built this town. From scratch. Dismissed by his critics as a feudal Disneyland for nostalgists. Celebrated by its residents as livable and lovely. Officially, Poundbury is an "autonomous urban extension," a community of about 4,600 residents, at the edge of Dorchester in south England, just a few miles from the sea. Three home-building companies did most of the construction. Unofficially, Poundbury is pure Charles. Of all the causes he championed while Britain's longest king-in-waiting, of all his hundreds of millions in assets, the town is perhaps his greatest obsession, his most fully realized vision. It is the physical manifestation of the way he thinks Britons — everyone, really — should live, work and commune with each other. He had already declared war on modern architecture. He disdained a proposed addition to London's National Gallery as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend." He denigrated a planned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe skyscraper as "yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London." He scolded 700 architects assembled at a banquet that they were "ignoring the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country." He would go on to pursue this line of attack in speeches, articles, a documentary and his manifesto, "A Vision for Britain." But the Poundbury project has been far more ambitious than a book. It has offered him a chance to go beyond words and images, and to put his ideas about natural harmony and "sacred geometry" into practice. He hired Léon Krier, a Luxembourgian architect and urban theorist, to draw the master plan, and over three decades the town has taken shape on what was once royal pasture land. Here, the narrow lanes are curlicues, like a medieval village, with abundant courtyards, alleyways and dead ends. There is not a single stop sign, let alone traffic light. To avoid uniformity, the town is a deliberate mash-up of architectural styles, all looking to the past: Greek Revival forms, Roman arcades, Palladium ornamentation. Ersatz Georgian manors sit next to re-created country cottages next to mock Industrial Age warehouses, now filled with low-rise luxury flats — and a nursing home. Poundbury looks weathered and mossy, like a lot of England. But the oldest buildings date to 1994.