Prince's Foundation bids for Cabe powers
Prince Charles at the RIBA Annual Lecture in 2009.
Source: Robert Leslie/RIBAThe Prince of Wales’ architectural charity is weighing up a plan to fill the gap left by Cabe by carrying out design reviews.
Prince’s Foundation chief executive Hank Dittmar told BD it would decide by Christmas whether to go ahead with the move.
“We’d have to talk to our network and assess the market,” he added. “”It would need to pay for itself but we wouldn’t be doing it to make money.”
He said its design review panels would have to reflect all style opinions to fend off accusations that only traditional architecture would get the thumbs-up.
Dittmar added: “To be credible, it would have to have democratic, independent judgement. We would have to have a panel that was balanced and not exclusively traditional architects.”
News the charity is eyeing a role in design review was immediately branded “an absolute disaster” by former Stirling Prize winner Will Alsop.
“The Prince’s Foundation has a definite architectural agenda,” Alsop said. “We know what it is. The Prince is not impartial at all, he would get involved and his meddling would increase.”
But Robert Adam, who sat on the Cabe design review panel for six years, said it was about time other styles were represented by design reviews.
“I was on it to provide balance but in the end [Cabe] became a huge bureaucracy where the balance had been lost and ended up peddling the established architectural view.”
The government is still speaking to Cabe about the prospects for salvaging parts of its function. The majority of Cabe’s 125 staff have now been given their redundancy notices ahead of the body’s closure next March but architecture minister John Penrose said: “We are still in discussions with Cabe about its future.”
It has emerged just a handful of bodies, including the RIBA, the Sorrell Foundation and Kevin McCloud’s development firm HAB, lobbied Penrose to spare Cabe.
RIBA director of public affairs Anna Scott-Marshall said it was also looking at ways to fund future design reviews. “We need to find ways of funding the work so we are exploring options with others about what happens next.”
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Readers' comments (29)
Please let this be a horrible nightmare...I want to wake up now!
The benefit of CABE,irrespective of the criticism its work attracted from those who desire absolute freedom to do as they wish without the benefit of constructive advice, was its impartiality. The prince's Foundation could never be seen as impartial. Cabe's role was to be constructive and helpful,and to improve the quality of the built environment. It didn't champion one kind of architecture over another, but we can be sure that the prince's foundation would come under severe pressure despite any safeguards, to advance HRH own agenda, that possibility must be avoided at all costs
GID
Hell's Bells: Why did CABE have 125 members of staff ? The RFAC, which it replaced, managed to provide a similar service with a team of less than a dozen and a wealth of diverse and talented, voluntary support from all facets of the architectural profession.
Oh dear.
I wonder whether the RIBA will remain silent on the subject as per usual. Just like the spending review.
We all moan about the RIBA, the ARB, CABE (RIP) and now, rightly so, HRH policing UK architecture.
About time for a coup?
To be credible and in keeping with the valuable advances made in recent years in UK design review by CABE, regional architectural organisations, RDAs and other local panels already existing and formed by local councils, such a design review organiser would need to avoid the Foundation's skewed new urbanist agenda. Why? Because NU may have some common sense elements such as prioritising connectivity in street plans, but its approach to urban space is generic, and not research-based. It's narrowly code-based, and not geared to the cultural differentiation of community living space that is a hallmark of the best UK urban design both past, present and in the works. The Foundation doesn't have the credibility and innate inclusivity in cultural approach to lead on this.
Surely this is a massive conflict of interest anyway? Also what why does he consider good architectural design as a charity, and why would a charity be involved in such commercial decisions.
CABE TOO HAS HAD ITS' ARCHITECTURAL AGENDA!
Valerie: naturally CABE has had an agenda: that has been its job. See http://www.cabe.org.uk/councillors/principles, for example, to which it would be hard to object, especially given the vast numbers of terrible buildings and schemes across the UK that in any case get realised without any apparent quality design input. Hopefully CABE's wealth of knowledge, expertise and principles will not be wasted.