Prince Charles tries to build bridges with architects

Prince Charles spoke last night to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) almost exactly 25 years after he lambasted the profession at the same venue and made his notorious "monstrous carbuncle" comment about the modernist plans for the National Gallery extension.

This time, speaking in the midst of a very public row over Richard Rogers's modernist design for new flats on the site of the former Chelsea Barracks, he faced a potential backlash from Britain's architects; some had even boycotted the lecture.

In the event, the auditorium was packed – the absentees' seats having been swiftly re-allocated - and Charles had clearly decided to build bridges this time. Indeed, he was almost contrite, even using the 'S' word. "I am sorry," he said, "if I somehow left the faintest impression [in the 1980s] that I wished to kick-start some kind of style war between classicists and modernists."

However, the 60-year-old prince did not entirely backtrack on his views. He said he would not criticise a work of art hanging in someone's private home, but architects had to be more careful with what they created, because "architecture and the built environment affect us all".

It was those sentiments that led Charles to publicly demand last month that Richard Rogers's glass-and-steel design for the Chelsea Barracks site, so close to Christopher Wren's stately Royal Hospital, should be reconsidered. He urged developers and planners to consider instead a Wren-inspired brick, stone and slate structure by his favourite neo-classicist architect, Quinlan Terry. Several architects considered his 11th-hour intervention not only an insult to their profession, but undemocratic.

Lord Rogers did not attend the speech, but the Prince got in a dig at the 75-year-old anyway when he noted that it was the profession’s "old gentlemen" who were still creating abstract designs while younger and more recently trained architects were either reverting to classical designs, or at any rate "beginning to value the lessons of history once again". The audience listened politely, laughing at the royal quips, until the very end when a single voice piped up: "Abolish the monarchy!"