Reuniting Urban Form and Urban Process: The Prince of Wales's Urban Design Task Force

This article explains how the Prince of Wales's interventions of the 1980s in architecture gave rise to his Institute of Architecture and his Urban Design Task Force (UDTF). It points out that both institutions were intended to foster closer dialogue between theory and practice, and to embed formal architectural and planning typologies in building process. A distinction is drawn between the approach of the UDTF and the 'urban village' thinking which underlies The Prince's Foundation (successor body to the Institute of Architecture). The Institute of Architecture and the UDTF were helped by the fact that Leon Krier and Christopher Alexander, respectively leaders of the formal and process-orientated (or 'structural') schools of urban design, supported their efforts. The unique encounter between the two suggested a 'Third Way' for urban propositions, able to mediate between political extremes (e.g. between historical reconstruction and a modernist tabula rasa ), and to provide clear formal strategies of an i...