Wrecking Wren's London Skyline

By Christopher Ogden/London

He's done it before. In 1984 he called a proposed design for a new wing of the National Gallery a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved friend." In the same speech he characterized a planned Mies van der Rohe office building in London's financial district as a "glass stump." Opening a factory last May, he likened the new building to a Victorian prison -- to the delight of the workers, if not of management. But last week Prince Charles swapped his sniper's rifle for a shotgun and took his broadest aim yet at Britain's architects and planners. The charge: destroying London's historic skyline.

"You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe," the Prince said at the annual dinner of the Corporation of London Planning and Communications Committee. "When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that." Worst of all, he complained, Sir Christopher Wren's majestic St. Paul's Cathedral has been overshadowed by a jumble of ugly office buildings. "In the space of a mere 15 years, in the '60s and '70s, your predecessors as the planners, architects and developers wrecked the London skyline and desecrated the dome of St. Paul's," the Prince lectured the stunned black-tie audience.

Tough words from the heir to the throne, however amateur his status as an architecture critic. And they were all the more jarring to Britons who consider their capital the embodiment of cultural sophistication. Yet the Prince had a point. Architecturally, the capital lost its way after World War - II. Shortsighted planners with paper-thin budgets did compound the devastation of the Blitz. The glories of John Nash's Regency terraces, Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, John Soane's Bank of England and Wren's churches were juxtaposed with discordantly cheap, gray cement-and-glass office boxes and grim "purpose-built" public housing that sprouted in craters left by German V-bombs. Squares and courtyards were bulldozed flat. Planners who felt that London was too dense and dark decided that new buildings should reach up high in search of light. They rose, in fact, to the 52-story, 600-ft. level of the NatWest Tower, dwarfing the 365-ft.-high St. Paul's dome. According to Gavin Stamp, architecture critic of the London Daily Telegraph, "Wren's skyline was lost, not owing to any conscious decision, but to a sort of collective fit of absence of mind."

Much of the ugliest architecture is in and around the City, London's financial district. Some of the worst examples: the crude, polygonal Stock Exchange tower; the gloomy, 35-acre concrete jungle of Barbican Center, which includes apartments, shops, offices and a cultural center; and the cheap glass series of towers constituting London Wall. In other London districts examples also abound, many built with public funds. One of the least distinguished is the coarsely slablike headquarters of the Department of the Environment, which may help explain its failure to advance the cause of quality architecture.

Despite the plethora of poorly designed and shabbily constructed buildings, there have been some intriguing additions. The most stunning development project in London, indeed in Western Europe, is the multibillion-dollar regeneration of the Docklands, the decayed wharf district along the River Thames in the City's east end. Today the government-sponsored project boasts attractive apartments and offices, and even an airport.

For controversy, nothing touches the new Lloyd's of London building, the exotically complex but exciting insurance-exchange headquarters designed by Richard Rogers. The structure is designed around a soaring, 240-ft. atrium and, recalling Rogers' 1977 Pompidou Center in Paris, its elevators and its plumbing, heating and air-conditioning ducts are exposed on the outside. The building has its champions, but many underwriters complain of a lack of light, proper ventilation and heating. Lloyd's plans to redesign parts of the interior.

One undoubted recent success is James Stirling's multicolored Clore Gallery, a wing of the Tate Gallery, which opened earlier this year as the repository of the Tate's nonpareil J.M.W. Turner collection. Stirling created a well- proportioned and handsome set of viewing rooms with a crisply formal yet amusing exterior, highlighted by a cutaway pediment entrance. As for the National Gallery, after several abortive efforts, including the "carbuncle" debacle, it has settled for restraint: a safe, classically modern stone-faced design by American Architect Robert Venturi for its much needed $63 million extension.

Buildings like the Clore Gallery and Venturi's addition, which contrast but do not clash with their neighbors, are hopeful auguries for the London skyline. This may be the computer age, but, as Prince Charles says, why do people have to be surrounded by "buildings that look like such machines?" The answer, as Londoners may be starting to realize, is that they don't.