He didn't say anything quite as controversial as the time in 1984 when he called a proposed extension to Britain's National Gallery,"a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend." But his remarks did show how much he and other critics of modernism have matured. No longer are they simply opposing new buildings because they don't look like old ones. Rather, they are advancing a positive vision intended, in Charles' words, "to accommodate the car while celebrating the pedestrian."
Charles, who received the museum's Vincent Scully Prize, described Poundbury, the New Urbanist community he is building in Britain, as a place possessing "a new kind of modernity." From pictures, it looks more or less like a traditional English village, with narrow streets and neat brick houses with sloped roofs and chimneys. Home values in Poundbury are skyrocketing (the Prince is making a tidy sum), yet a good number of the units are reserved for working-class families.
Some still criticize Poundbury as a backward-looking theme park of an English village. Charles, on the other hand, argued that "Traditionalism is not about style or pastiche. It's about learning from the best of what has come before."
