“They don’t build things like that anymore!” Such expostulations—usually heard in the vicinity of palaces, ancient ruins, and cathedrals—have always been lazy, but one brief glance at Living Tradition: The Architecture and Urbanism of Hugh Petter demonstrates they are also patently untrue. The book is replete with rich photographs of even richer buildings: a seventy-foot triumphal arch in Atlanta, Georgia, or a second Chatsworth built in Windsor, United Kingdom (necessitating the employment of six French stone factories), illustrate that there is still an appetite for architectural ambition in patrons as well as aptitude in architects such as Petter.
Such dazzling exemplars, however, belie this architect’s soft-spoken and nuanced attitude: “I am always pleased when someone stands in front of one of my buildings and asks what I’ve done,” Petter says. A quiet and collaborative creative process has undoubtedly contributed to Petter’s success with Britain’s notoriously tricky planning authorities. This approach also filters down to the architecture itself. The most interesting example is Nansledan, the new town currently being built by the Duchy of Cornwall, for which Petter is the master planner and coordinating architect. International readers may be surprised in the way that some passages—lucidly written by Clive Aslet—read more like legal drama than architectural biography.
Any British architect of Petter’s generation will have felt the influence of the former Prince of Wales on their career, but for Petter, King Charles III has held more sway than most. During Petter’s training at Portsmouth in the 1980s, the dogmatism on both sides of the modernist versus anti-modernist debate was so vicious that the reception of his decidedly traditional thesis project alternated between a grade of distinction and borderline failure as it was handed between the different examiners. The Prince of Wales’s watershed Mansion House speech in 1987 was a rallying cry under which the first-wave “traditionalists” (Leon Krier, Robert Adam, Christopher Alexander, et al.) mustered their counteroffensive against the modernists of the architectural establishment. The results included a summer school for young architects (Petter was one of the first students) and later, the much-publicized designing and building of Poundbury (population four thousand and counting) on the prince’s land in Dorset.
Nansledan has variously been called “Poundbury Mark II” and “Surfbury,” thanks to the popular pastime of its coastal residents. It draws on the ingredients for success already found at Poundbury: local building typologies; traditional styles; slow development rates; focus on affordable homes; and integration of residential, commercial, and public zones to promote a stronger sense of civic identity and community. Where it departs from the Poundbury blueprint is of even greater interest, however. Poundbury is consciously architectural: like an architectural pattern book laid out, every view is rich in detail and at times has the air of an operatic stage set. Petter’s Nansledan, however, is more muted, polite, digestible. The majority of the houses are simply rendered, small details being saved only for “place-makers”—a house on the end of the street might be faced in local stone or a shop on the corner might have simple moldings about the windows. This creates a sense of direction as the visitor is pulled from point to point, but also lends verismo, which Poundbury lacks. Economy in ornament brings to the fore all the other components that make a town: edible gardens, orchards, and allotments support a “foodweb” for which the architecture is merely a skeleton. An even greater focus on local commerce (this area being more disadvantaged than Poundbury) is evident in the higher proportion of affordable homes (again spread among the plan rather than segregated) and the insistence on using local materials, which, as well as being visually appropriate, enables local trade to participate in the building of the site. The consequently slower rate of development is also part of the plan: by selling only one hundred houses each year, newcomers integrate more naturally into the community and land values increase steadily, allowing the estate to recoup the high initial outlay through later land sales and commercial letting, a model already proven by Poundbury.
There are private houses from Petter’s earlier career that have more architectural detail than all of Nansledan put together, but it is clear that it is at Nansledan where Petter’s creative approach has been most successful. Through his quiet collaboration with the local community, builders, and architectural teams, the town, still only in its infancy, has already a subtle beauty. At Nansledan, the architect’s hand—like the best actors, who disappear into their roles—has melted into the town. In common with other Triglyph publications, this is a lavishly illustrated album of the architect’s most eye-catching work, succinctly described in Aslet’s elegant prose. Petter is at the vanguard of twenty-first-century urbanism, and it would be of great value to learn more of this architect’s insights into a topic that will only increase in relevance.