Chelsea Barracks Partnership said a number of the architects bidding for the project had extended their teams to include specialist architectural and landscaping support.
Initial submissions will be considered by an evaluation panel and in a surprise move a member of Prince Charles’ charity, The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, is included.
A shortlist of three teams will be invited to submit second stage proposals in November and a final winner announced in December.
‘We are confident that the ten candidate teams that have been assembled will achieve our objective of securing an outstanding range of masterplan experience and a broad sweep of design approaches for the Chelsea Barracks site,’ a spokesman said.
It is clear they are taking no chances this time.
The previous planning application for one of the most prestigious and largest development sites in London was withdrawn at the last minute after it emerged that planning officials were not prepared to back it.
This came shortly after the Prince wrote to Qatari Diar, the real estate investment group owned by the Qatari royal family that has a major stake in the project, expressing concerns about the development and describing it as too dense and modern for such an historic site.
This prompted an outburst from Lord Rogers, whose architecture firm Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners designed the project, who personally criticised the Prince and said he had broken a constitutional understanding by sending a private letter that clearly influenced the decision to withdraw the planning application.
The feud between the modernist and traditionalist camps over the site has, however, inspired a work of art.
An architect’s collective, Mobile Studio, has designed a game of chess in which the pieces are all based on neoclassical revivalist and modernist buildings.
Called A Vision of Britain, it is described as ‘a satirical work that draws on current debates over the Prince of Wales’s controversial interventions into the UK Planning process. It acts as a metaphor for the continuing debate on taste, style the future of British housing, architecture and planning’.
