ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 1, 1996 TAG: 9607010029
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: Associated Press
THE HEIR TO BRITAIN'S THRONE will be in Virginia this month when he visits students in his Institute of Architecture who are studying in the U.S.
The British are coming. Prince Charles himself will lead the charge to Virginia when he visits the United States this month on a crusade to put fine art back into American architecture.
Cultural imperialism? Not a bit of it, insist his aides.
Charles, heir to the British throne, will visit Asheville, N.C., on July 17 to meet students at a summer school run by his own Institute of Architecture, palace officials said Thursday.
Like Prince Charles himself, the institute emphasizes grace, harmony and human values in town planning.
The summer school will run for six weeks, starting at Asheville's Biltmore House, a 250-room mansion built by George Vanderbilt, and moving on to Charlottesville, Va., Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Va.
Some 20 students, mostly Americans, will pay up to $3,000 to attend the course.
While in Washington, students will be asked to draw up plans to redevelop Lafayette Square, frequently the site of demonstrations near the White House.
Proposals might include ``some sort of small monument to perhaps celebrate the history of protest,'' senior tutor Victor L. Deupi, a Cuban-American, suggested in an interview.
But the institute's director of studies, Richard John, hastened to add that this wouldn't mean Prince Charles was endorsing such protests.
``One has to make a clear distinction between proposals produced by his students in a summer school, and what the prince himself might advocate,'' said John, a former Oxford University don.
Prince Charles first spoke out on architectural issues in 1984 when he famously described a proposed extension to London's National Gallery, off Trafalgar Square, as a ``monstrous carbuncle on the face of a well-loved friend.''
Britain's normally racy tabloid press went into overdrive with a series of scholarly articles which attempted to explain to puzzled readers what ``carbuncle'' meant. It meant ``malignant tumor,'' the newspapers decided.
Since then, Charles has attracted both praise and criticism for his views on architecture. Critics accuse him of nostalgia for the era of King George III in the late 18th century, the golden age of neoclassical English cities such as Bath. That city in western England is noted for its gracefully curving avenues, called crescents by the English.
But John insisted that his summer school would not attempt to export Britain's cultural heritage to the United States.
``One thing we need to make very clear is that we're not about cultural imperialism,'' he said. ``We're not saying for one moment that the sort of crescents we find in Georgian Bath are appropriate for Richmond, Virginia.''
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