Let them eat gilt - French Architecture News 2003

The Guardian

For all the fine words the Prince of Wales has uttered on the subject, no one can accuse him, or his family, of forcing grand royal projects on future subjects. It is to the Queen's governments and ministers that we owe our most endearing and enduring designs over the past 50 years. The fundamentally decent Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank is a legacy of Clement Atlee's fundamentally decent postwar Labour governments. To a French head of state, such a building must seem wilfully banal or earnest, boring and hoary. A president's legacy must surely be built on more opulent intents, embroidered with richer designs. Jacques Chirac, we learn, is to spend Ł270m of public money over the next 17 years on the refurbishment of Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. Gates torn down and put to the torch by revolutionary regicides in the 1790s will be restored. The palace courtyard will be nurtured back to full Bourbon bloom.

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