David Brussat

David Brussat, the Prince, and the Führer

Since 1990, David Brussat has been writing an architecture column for the Providence Journal’s op-ed page, and has won widespread acclaim, as well as an Arthur Ross Award from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, for his pungent advocacy of traditional architecture and urbanism.

In our blog we present two Brussat columns. The most recent concerns a truly historic speech by the Prince of Wales, delivered at the Royal Institute of British Architects on May 12, 2009. In his “maiden” RIBA speech of 1984 the Prince entered the architectural fray by denouncing a preposterous addition design for London’s National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” (The design was scrapped as a result.) As Brussat makes clear, those who dismiss the Prince as a clueless antiquarian are simply wrong.

An earlier Brussat column highlights modernists’ deeply ingrained penchant for the pathetic fallacy — in this case, the erroneous attribution of a morally evil character to the classical architectural vocabulary — in their ongoing quest to disqualify the great tradition on specious historical grounds.

The National Civic Art Society is proud to count David Brussat among its members.