Saving Dumfries House
The image was drawn during a residency at Dumfries House, a mansion and ground saved by HRH King Charles in 2007 when it was at risk of being sold at a public auction. This artwork explores Dumfries as an anthropological space: The relentless march of financialisation and the juggernaut of industrialisation is represented as a multi-headed demon from the Ramayana encroaching onto the estate; when you cut off a head, another grows back. There are financial skyscrapers and oil facilities on the heads. A battle commences inside the Grand Orrey — a model of the solar system — which sets the setting for the theoretical world of Dumfries houses. However, a plot twist exists: the economic theorist and author Fredrick Hayek remote-controls the demon.
Dumfries in context:
The Dumfries project grew after Charles voiced public concerns about the impact of farming, genetic modification, global warming, social deprivation, planning, and architecture. The news said he was the ‘meddling prince’. He set up a space and a constellation of organisations to prototype his ideas. We can read Dumfries House as the product of a value prism. ‘We transcribe architecture in terms of ourselves.’ said Geoffrey Scott; so, the interventions on the estate relate to the essential responsibilities and duties of the Royalty reflected in the interventions.
The monarchy is a supreme executive position at the top of a three-part house system of kings, lords, and commons. The Crown will agree to the majority of significant decision-making within the country. The stricture forms the foundation for company structures and charities in the U.K. with a Director or Person of Significant control in a hierarchy — the same role at a much smaller scale. Royalty exists on the premise that it is pro-inequality and pro-wealth, which in some ways drives the aesthetic tastes of aristocratic culture. However, despite its excesses, there are social welfare philosophies that fundamentally stem from religious teachings, which are a core pillar of its reason for existence. Jesus Christ was a radical humanist, and genuinely following these beliefs gives a floor to inequality.
The Prince’s Charities have progressive employment and social welfare systems that reflect Christian beliefs but have the ornament of classicism. The Dumfries House project often needs to be clarified because it sits in a tension zone between the religious monarchy and the prevailing economic thesis. The industrial thesis focuses on eroding the environment, heritage, and local culture. The Scottish estate is attractive to architectural historians but divides opinion because it does not fit into the binary political spectrum of preconceptions.
At its root, the royal family defends faith and holds a moral compass. However, the current economic consensus is to do away with religious ideals. In this context, Kathleen Raine, a great poet and friend, compared him to Arjuna from Hindu history. This warrior notoriously faced great moral dichotomies on the principle of war: the great battle of Kurukshetra.
The symbolism of the Dumfries estate
Architecture has a symbolic function: today, Dumfries House is a storehouse of meaning, tracing back to Charles’ book Harmony, in which he outlined a manifesto of his ideas. In the early days, the King placed the book on the desk of every Dumfries House employee.
When I visited Dumfries House, I discovered that The plants represent the solar system and a secret geometry beyond matter. I drew and analysed almost fifteen architectural pavilions that reflect his ideas of nature and harmony through traditional Crafts. I saw faculties where artisans were given genuine support and belief in the value of their work, which mainstream orthodoxy doesn’t provide. I also spoke to the locals in the pubs, who shared that systems of local skills-based employment support mining families in Scotland, who face severe economic pressures due to globalising core industries. All of these are pretty good as fundamental values.
The house itself is Palladian, with some good Chippendale furniture. However, the ongoing experiments on the grounds are far more exciting and represent a more developed idea of order -the diversity of plant life and wildlife planned as sustainable agriculture in harmony with human organisations. These reflect a complex mesh of concepts that are still evolving.
Dumfries as a discourse with Parliament
All architecture responds to other architecture. Dumfries House can be seen as a proof-building exercise to convince politicians to do things differently. In Peter Blundell Jones’ book Architecture and Ritual, the architectural historian analyses how the English parliamentary system adapts to the French system, which we inherited left and right. The British Parliament borrowed the format of adversarial governance and added it to the existing governance of the House of Lords and monarchy, established much earlier.
The nuanced political relationships between Crown and Parliament are ritualised, renewed, and carried out through ceremonies like black rods bashing on the door. Parliament’s two-party seating arrangement has influenced national discourse and created an inescapable binary form of politics. Blundell Jones Jones argues that political ideas and groupings are much more diverse. You would see the true diversity if you’d simply changed the seating.
Environmentalism, Extinction Rebellion and the King.
The king believes that fully appreciating the core ideas of Harmony, and Dumfries House would require us to change so much. Today people who engage with his charities try to find a way to exist within some cognitive dissonance, between the political frameworks promoted by the news and the lived experiences of the anthropological spaces. Recently, we saw environmental demonstrators from the Extinction Rebellion occupy the grounds of Charles’ mansion and then leave letters of support afterwards, thanking him for his environmental protection work. The simultaneous protest and appreciation give some merit to King Charles’s premise.
Mythology kings are portrayed as heroes, slaying dragons and drawing swords from stones. However, because of the political context, King Charles’s time as prince made him an anti-hero in the extinction rebellion. An unlikely ally. Rather than the D.C. comic hero Superman — a figure everybody loves, He is more like a Spider-Man from Marvel, constantly fighting battles without recognition or praise and being criticised by the daily bugle(the newspaper) who misrepresents his deeds.
In the opening paragraph of Harmony, King Charles said, ‘This is a call to revolution. The Earth is under threat. It cannot cope with all that we demand of it. It is losing its balance, and humans are causing this.’ Revolution is a strong word, and I use it deliberately. ‘because it builds on this book, Dumfries is fundamentally a reformist project. It exists to lobby the political system away from industrialisation and towards environmental protection. It wants to change the nature of what we consider progress, just as Extinction Rebellion does.
In the artwork, extinction rebellion protesters are skinny-dipping in the freshwater river, and the squeamish visitors and staff look shocked and gossip about it. The nearest train station, Auchenleck, is being trampled on by the gigantic financialisation demon.
The road to harmony sometimes has some chaos. The then prince wanted the political system to approach complex and connected problems much better than it currently does. However, as Blundell Jones argued, the establishment would need an architectural redesign of the Parliament building to grapple with this complexity. But fixing anything in the British constitution is fraught with risk.
The comedy in the in-between moments
Some comical moments give humanity to this story. Early on in the debate in the 1980s, the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe got caught in the crossfire of the battle. In this artwork, he’s shown tripping over a rock while holding his number one poultry square project, a project that was recently the subject of a book by Jack Self. Architectural historians are getting out of the falling Seagram skyscraper building, which formed a defining moment in the Style War of architectural discourse.
Later in life, Charles gave a speech to the RIBA in 2009, talking about his position in full:
‘Now, there is something I’ve been itching to say about the last time I addressed your Institute, in 1984, and that is that I am sorry if I somehow left the faintest impression that I wished to kick-start some kind of ‘style war’ between Classicists and Modernists; or that I somehow wanted to drag the world back to the eighteenth century. …. To my mind, that earlier speech also addressed a much more fundamental division than that between Classicism and Modernism: namely the one between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to architecture. Today, I’m sorry to say, there still remains a gulf between those obsessed by forms (and Classicists can be as guilty of this as Modernists, Postmodernists, or Post-Postmodernists), and those who believe that communities have a role to play in design and planning.
For millennia before the arrival of the modern architect, human intervention in the environment often managed to be beautiful, irrespective of stylistic concerns, because the ‘deep structure’ of those interventions was consonant with a natural order, and therefore generated an organic, nature-like order in the built world. “
Dumfries has pavilions and prototypes around the estate to respond to these ideas. The students and craftspeople who make them use community participation methodologies involving all stakeholders. Although this often results in traditionally ornamented pavilions, the bottom-up approach is, in effect, a planning pipeline that echoes Walter Segal’s approach, a sort of skilled and highly trained self build with community consultation attached. More the organic stylistic realisation somewhat more fascinating. The institution signs off on these proposals, but the craftspeople and production methods are more William Morris than William the Conquerer.
Conclusion
Dumfries House is a world, but it’s not only physical; it fits into a sizeable socio-political system. We can learn more about King Charles’s days as a prince by reading and understanding it. If we read it as a manifesto of ideas, we know much about his relationship to parliament.
Dumfries House gives insight into what our current King hopes to bring to fruition. The bulk of these are good: environmental protection, fair housing provision and arts and crafts training. With a personal preference for perennial iconoclasm in the rendering. But the reigning monarch is technically neutral, so does the position allow it?
