Prince of Wales's speech in full

As the Prince of Wales walked into the forbidding grandeur of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) last night, 25 years of enmity and suspicion hanging over him like an ancient family feud, it was the one thing that few members of his audience would have been expecting him to say.

Less than two minutes into his awaited address to a profession that has, for the large part, been a sworn enemy of the Prince for a quarter of a century, he reminded them of the speech that no one there could have forgotten — and said sorry.

It did, perhaps, fall a little short of a full-blooded apology; and he did then go on to make some sharp criticisms of the entire architectural profession. But by the Prince’s standards his appeal to architects to make better buildings by looking to the past — and to Nature — was him extending the hand of friendship. And he did not use the word “carbuncle” once.

It was exactly 25 years ago this month that Prince Charles was last invited to address Riba, at its 150th anniversary celebrations at Hampton Court. Members were expecting something anodyne and congratulatory: what they got was a heartfelt diatribe against the iniquities of modern architecture, in which he condemned the proposed National Gallery extension as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend”.

Opening the Riba Trust annual lecture in London last night, the Prince said: “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 kickstart some kind of ‘style war’ between Classicists and Modernists, or that I somehow wanted to drag the world back to the 18th century.”

All he wanted, he said, was for room to be given to traditional approaches to architecture and urbanism.

So far, so diplomatic; and indeed, when the invitation was extended to the Prince to speak as part of the institute’s 175th birthday celebrations it was intended, according to Sunand Prasad, the Riba president, as “a gesture of reconciliation”. But if any architects were under the impression that the Prince has mellowed since Hampton Court, they would have been rudely disabused last month when it was revealed that he had written to the developers of Chelsea Barracks urging them to reconsider the Lord Rogers of Riverside design for a £1 billion housing scheme to be built opposite the Chelsea Hospital.

The Prince was accused of threatening the “democratic process”, and last weekend some of Britain’s leading architects, including the Stirling prize-winner Will Alsop, called for a boycott of the Prince’s lecture. But it has been a sell-out for weeks.

The Prince may not have been there to pick a fight, but he was not going to give the country’s leading architects an easy ride, either.

In an impassioned critique of Modernism, he said: “It was when I was a teenager in the 1960s that I became profoundly aware of the brutal destruction that was being wrought on so many of our towns and cities, let alone on our countryside, and that much of the urban realm was becoming de-personalised and defaced.”

Few people in his audience would defend the soulless housing estates of that time, he said. But in a plea to look to the past for inspiration, he said: “The culture of architecture schools in general still overwhelmingly encourages students to focus on the exciting and the new, at the expense of the truly original.”

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