Feature: Interview with architect Peter Ahrends
Published: 15 July 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN
HIS face shows the remains of a black eye. It is not due to the punch-ups 77-year-old architect Peter Ahrends has had with Prince Charles, more the result of an unfortunate tumble at his home in Rochester Road, Kentish Town.
Yet it is symbolic of a battle of words that goes back some 25 years, to the awful moment the heir to the throne damned his firm’s plans for an extension to the National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”
The revelation of Prince Charles’ latest interference in the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment saga in the High Court in recent weeks stirred dark memories for Ahrends of the shock – and the rough economic consequences it produced – for the Primrose Hill-based architects Ahrends, Burton and Koralek when their project was equally dismantled, virtually by royal command.
And it brought back to life the campaign he has helped direct against the abuse of the democratic planning process by an outsider with tremendous influence, who has equally attacked the work of other distinguished modern architects.
Remarkably, while he has described the situation as “medieval”, Berlin-born Ahrends, who escaped the Nazis, aged four, bears no grudges.
Reconciliation is the word that propels him forward to seek some more conciliatory form of justice. This, he believes, may well be the moment to bring about such change.
“My interest is an approach to the Prince that tries to see if there is a way of discussing these important issues,” he explains. “I’d be surprised if Prince Charles is thoughtless about them. He has shown his serious concern about where life has taken us in the past quarter of a century.
“And rather than be antagonistic, there is an opportunity for reconciliation, provided there is willingness on both sides, and a recognition that it crosses the line unacceptably when he actually begins to damn and quash projects he dislikes.”
Ahrends would like to see some forum, whereby all sides could sit down and discuss differing points of view on major architectural projects, especially those, like the National Gallery, won by international competition.
Yet he is ambivalent too when asked if he believes the Prince will no longer continue his personal vendetta against modernity. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he insists. “I doubt if he is very embarrassed by what has happened over Chelsea Barracks even now that the public focus has been growing.”
So, as he ponders the right moment to make an approach, Ahrends reflects on those fascinating moments when he twice met the prince. He tells too, for the first time in dramatic detail, how the competition-winning National Gallery scheme was considerably changed, in discussion with the Gallery’s late director, Michael Levey, trustees and developer.
They sought more space for the extension, which also included offices to help foot the cost of the scheme and an agreed enhanced scheme was submitted to Westminster City Council for planning consent.
A public inquiry followed that produced a go-ahead signal, along with conditions that were in no way worrying until, at an RIBA gold medal dinner at Hampton Court, Prince Charles issued his explosive carbuncle criticism and killed it on the spot.
“Yes, it was a shock,” Ahrends recalls. “It was a tough time as a result of his intervention. But one is there to survive and we went on to do other things, the new British Embassy in Moscow, and had a good life over the next 20 years.”
With his partners, he invited Prince Charles to lunch in Chalcot Road, though first the Prince invited him and 10 other leading architects to dinner at Kensington Palace. When he finally arrived for lunch he did see the original first scheme for the National Gallery. And as he left Prince Charles said: “I’m sorry it had to be you!”
Ahrends now accepts that apology, though he still ruminates about the subtle choice of words.
But he does point out: “Modern architecture is all around us, it is part of our lives and it always has been. Cities have always changed. There has never been a moment in time when that change has been so apparent as now. And when it has been happening quicker than ever before.”
That is probably one reason why he has stepped back into abstract thoughts he has had about the theme of Absence and Presence, and how they can be represented, as with architecture, as an “installation” in a large scale visual form. Part of this new work in progress touches too on “the essentially temporal and fugitive quality of masks” and what they hide from us.
His ambition is to present his installation at an exhibition in Berlin, city of his birth where his architect grandfather had his practice closed by the Nazis, and from which his architect father and weaver mother fled with him before the full force of the Holocaust descended.
He sees it as a kind of homecoming that completes the circle of his enterprising life helping others, fighting for justice for the deprived still living in shanty South African townships, for example. But which reconciliation comes first, peace with the Prince or peace in Berlin, undoubtedly depends very much on his Royal Highness.