The Prince of Wales at Poundbury in Dorset in December 2001. Built on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, Poundbury is the urban extension to Dorchester built on principles of architecture and urban planning as advocated by The Prince of Wales in his book, A Vision of Britain (1989). The development is conceived as a model for humanly scaled and genuinely sustainable urban development

I was somewhat surprised to be asked by this magazine to explain why I consider traditional approaches and universal principles so important in the design of buildings and urban environments. It is heartening, I must say, that the magazine is encouraging a ‘Big Rethink’ because designing places according to the human scale and with Nature at the heart of the process has always been my central concern. The reason for that, I think, has too often been misunderstood …

I have lost count of the times I have been accused of wanting to turn the clock back to some Golden Age. Nothing could be further from my mind. My concern is the future. We face the terrifying prospect by 2050 of another three billion people on this planet needing to be housed, and architects and urban designers have an enormous role to play in responding to this challenge. We have to work out now how we will create resilient, truly sustainable and human-scale urban environments that are land-efficient, use low-carbon materials and do not depend so completely upon the car. However, for these places to enhance the quality of people’s lives and strengthen the bonds of community, we have to reconnect with those traditional approaches and techniques honed over thousands of years which, only in the 20th century, were seen as ‘old-fashioned’ and of no use in a progressive modern age. It is time to take a more mature view......Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review