The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 10

To Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, beauty and harmony are the same thing.

He says so in his recent book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. This is a book all budding environmentalists need to read, since it tells how we can fit our human strivings legitimately into a mindset that keeps Mother Nature — the environment — front and center. I've been musing over Charles's wisdom in this ongoing "The Royal Road to Harmony" series.

I'd now like to investigate what His Royal Highness means when he equates harmony and beauty.

I'll be talking about his views on architecture: specifically, how adherence to the 'way of patterns' renders buildings (and all other things) beautiful. I'll add to that a recent experience of mine which I think confirms Charles's insights when extended outward from architecture into the realm of public spaces. I'll take a look at an 'everything fits' harmony of lovely old houses, green spaces, and public gardens as they serve to make up the community of Guilford in Baltimore, Maryland.

Bradford in West Yorkshire, England

First, though, HRH's own thoughts. The Prince of Wales talks in his book about a project he underwrote in 'a fairly depressed part of Bradford in West Yorkshire'. Teens in Bradford were asked to identify and photograph the local buildings they most liked or disliked. Charles writes:

To my fascination, all the buildings they most disliked were built in the 1960s and 1970s of concrete, steel and glass and all the ones they liked were the few remaining, older buildings, like the town hall, church and library, together with the small area which had a pond and trees. When I talked with them about this they were unaware of their reasons why, but it seemed to me they were responding subconsciously to that inner, natural language of patterning I have been describing here that is so clearly reflected in the older buildings.

Here is Bradford Town City Hall, a building they liked:

Here is a car park in Gateshead, England, in the 'Brutalist' style which the teens hated:

The difference is clear.

Guilford in Baltimore, Maryland

Tulips in Sherwood Gardens,
Guilford, Baltimore

Guilford is an anything-but-depressed residential neighborhood in Baltimore, MD, whose crown jewel, shown at left, is Sherwood Gardens. Guilford was designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and his brother John Charles Olmsted, who inherited the nation's first landscape architecture business from their father Frederick Law Olmsted. It was under the immediate direction of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., that the Guilford community was laid out and planned.

Just before I read Prince Charles's discussion of beauty and harmony in architecture, I happened to be walking in Guilford with an old college friend. We were talking about the 'everything fits' harmony of the neighborhood, viewed on  foot. As we walked we found that we couldn't wait to find out what the next house looked like, and the next, and the next. There were no disappointments.

'Everything fits' means 'in accordance with patterns to which we respond subconsciously, thus to know beauty'. There is accordingly an 'inner, natural language of patterning' which tells us when not only a building, but also a garden or a neighborhood, is beautiful.

Another meaning is 'organic'. To the traveler on foot, Guilford feels organic, in the sense that there is never a feeling that anything is forced into a pre-existing mold.

Houses in the area around Sherwood Gardens are quite beautiful, and each is unique:

As you walk about in Guilford, as I said before, you can't wait to see what the next house looks like. The community feels 'organic' because there are no cookie-cutter houses.

Here's Sherwood Gardens itself:

Below is a Google Maps satellite view of the neighborhood around the gardens (you can click on it to enlarge it):

All the open space in the diamond-shaped area containing the red drop pin at the leftmost corner is Sherwood Gardens.

Notice that the streets that make the diamond-shaped area are not straight and do not meet at right angles. This, again, adds to the 'organic' feel of the neighborhood.

The blue drop pin in the Google Maps overhead view sits on the famed Sherwood Mansion:

The above rendition shows how it looks from the gardens themselves.

Organic Beauty

It's tough to get a planned community to look like it has grown organically. Prince Charles lauds the city of Florence, Italy, for having done so:

Florence, Italy. A city that grew organically. There is no zoning. It is an integrated complex of streets, alleyways and piazzas where work is done, lives are lived and children play, learning from being amid the work being done by their parents. It is a system of patterns, interdependent at many levels.

Florence did grow organically, over time, but Guilford was planned. According to the website of the Guilford Association:

The community reflects Olmstedian landscape design principles in its curvilinear streets and respect for existing topography and vegetation. Installation of utilities, streets, drains and other infrastructure were estimated by the Company's engineers to require an investment of the then [in 1911] tremendous sum of one million dollars.

Moral: it costs money to make an 'organic' community on purpose! Beauty and harmony don't come cheap when they're done by design.

My overarching point, though, is there is such a thing as 'organic' beauty. Nature produces it ... well, naturally. Humans produce it, too. Sometimes they do it by accident, as with Florence. Sometimes they do it by plan, as with Guilford, or as with any of the buildings which the Bradford teens extolled.

If we are to get back into harmony with nature, we are going to have to learn once more how to design things — buildings, neighborhoods, domains of regulation and governance — that have organic beauty. In order to do that, as I tried to indicate in earlier posts in this series, we can learn much from the ancient arts of 'sacred geometry'.