Minister joins Prince’s war on modern architecture

A GOVERNMENT minister has taken up the Prince of Wales’s battle against modern architecture by saying “most of what’s been built in my lifetime could be demolished without aesthetic cost”.

John Hayes, a transport minister, said vandals daub graffiti on modern buildings – rather than older constructions – because people do not like them.

Mr Hayes, who has held ministerial posts in the Home Office and the education and energy departments, pledged to force new roads and railways to be designed in a “harmonious way”. The comments were deliberately meant to chime with repeated criticism of modern architecture by the Prince of Wales which he set out in his 1989 book A Vision of Britain.

The Prince made headlines five years earlier in 1984 when he described a proposed modern extension to the National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”.

In the speech on “Beauty” to the Respublica think tank, Mr Hayes – a

former Tory shadow housing and planning minister – said: “For at least 50 years, too often and in too many places, utility has been regarded as sufficient by callous architects, crass planners and careless politicians.

“It’s not just that form has been shaped by function, but that style has been neglected altogether. Greed and convenience have subsumed aesthetics.” He added: “Perhaps the most easily grasped and so persuasive counter to the zealous preachers of modernism is the relationship – understood for centuries but now neglected – between the simple, God-given beauty of nature and what man can do.

“The essence of Prince Charles’s case is that there are timeless principles of good design. Such an argument would for centuries have been regarded as a priori. Now the wish for art to please – to inspire – has been replaced by a thirst to shock, to alarm.”

Mr Hayes took aim at modern architects. He said: “Despite popular revulsion with much they have imposed upon us, those responsible – who rarely live where they have wrought havoc – viscously attack anyone who dares to articulate what most people know: that most of what’s been built in my lifetime could be demolished without aesthetic cost, and so bring the seductive benefit of leaving what was there before to stand proud.

“Through our appreciation of beauty, we come to terms with ourselves and others, as our senses are elevated by sensory joy.”

A spokesman for the Prince’s Foundation, which promotes his ideas on architecture, declined to comment.