Sometimes personalities have great influences on how a city architecture is developed. Often it’s from the top down and sometimes up from within.
When I was in London in 1984, Prince Charles, now King Charles, decided he wanted to influence how London’s architecture was to progress. I was there to hear his famous speech about “carbuncle architecture,” his term for contemporary architecture. He hated it with passion and wanted the city to embrace its traditional Gothic and Late Renaissance influenced design. Charles campaigned against and torpedoed modernist projects, going as far as building his own traditional town. The architectural community was aghast by the prince’s disdain for contemporary architecture with its clean surfaces without unnecessary embellishments. Ironically one of the world’s greatest contemporary architects, Norman Foster, was based in London and his work was referred to by the prince as “carbuncle.” Rather than embracing the future, Prince Charles, now England’s monarch, went backwards trying to reinvent an out-of-date and out-of-touch architecture. London has suffered ever since.
Theres a reason for my story: Napa’s downtown has undergone spurts of growths and recessions in its lifetime. The sleepy post-war days were interrupted in the 1960s by the urge to redevelopment it’s downtown and erased as many as 50 historic buildings while creating massive ugly structures like so many cities that thought they could instantly reshape their soul. This herald in a decline of Napa city as a desirable destination. I saw the same thing in San Rafael where they tore out the city’s heart for the sake of urban renewal…