His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales,
accepted The Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame
Patronage Award during a ceremony Jan. 27 at St. James’s Palace in London.
The Prince is a forceful advocate
for the maintenance of traditional building skills and sustainable urban design
and is keenly interested in how the built environment affects the quality of
people’s lives. The
Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, a charity established
personally by His Royal Highness, has led building and planning efforts in more
than 62 communities in the United Kingdom along with the United States, Africa
and Asia.
He received a bronze miniature of
the Tower of the Winds and donated the $150,000 prize to his foundation to
establish an undergraduate diploma course in sustainability and the building arts,
as part of the charity’s building-skill program. “It is an element of education
that I’ve long been desperate for my foundation to reintroduce,” Prince Charles
said at the ceremony, “and I’m thrilled that, thanks to the incredible kindness
of the Driehaus Foundation, it
will be able to do so.”
The Prince of Wales’ efforts to
create more sustainable and liveable communities, with an emphasis on putting
people’s needs at the center of the building and urban design process, dates
back more than two decades. On land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall in southern
England, the Prince established the town of Poundbury in the early 1990s based
on a master plan by architect and inaugural Richard
H. Driehaus Prize laureate Léon Krier. Poundbury is a New Urbanist town
notable for its high-density, mixed-use development, including homes and
businesses built with traditional methods and sustainable local materials,
including the market hall designed by British architect John Simpson.
The Patronage Award is the first of
its kind presented through the Richard
H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame, now in its 10th
year. The Patronage Award is a one-time honor to recognize the Prince’s
tireless commitment to traditional architecture and sustainable urban design.
“Prince Charles has put the ideals
of traditional architecture and urban design into practice around the world,”
saidMichael Lykoudis, the Francis and Kathleen
Rooney Dean of the University of Notre Dame School of
Architecture, who presented the award along with Richard H.
Driehaus. “The inspiring results — from Haiti to the Alder Hey Children’s
Hospital in Liverpool, from China to the Galapagos Islands — illuminate the power
of those ideals to create a more vibrant, beautiful and sustainable built
environment.”