I liked Stephen Bayley’s takedown of New Urbanist prig Duane Urbany in the Guardian last weekend, partly for its awful description of Poundbury, a traditionalist-veneered village [sic] in Dorset that’s beloved of Prince Charles:
To visit Poundbury is to be delivered to the furniture floor of a provincial department store in 1954, translated into architecture. It is fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute.
Sounds like early Levittown, but without the charm.
But I love Paul Russell’s bleak photoset of Poundbury, including this unexpectedly awesome photo of a tree. If I were feeling poignant, I’d say it’s doing a deft impression of a Rebecca Horn sculpture. But given the setting, we can be sure it’s actually trying to knock down the wall and flee. [via things]