THE demolition of 'run-down' family houses and their re-placement by concrete apartment blocks; the destruction of 'obsolete' churches and public buildings; the widening of roads and the obliteration of ancient street patterns; 'a kind of social engineering never seen before and never accomplished at this scale in Europe's long history'. Of which country in which decades is this a description? Although it is not markedly different from HRH Prince Charles's account of the architectural devastation of Britain since the 1950s - 'the wanton destruction which has taken place in this country in the name of progress' - the country is actually Romania, the time the present, the policy that of 'economic and social systematisation', adopted in 1974 and described by those courageous enough to criticise it openly as 'pitiless urbanism'. Both rapes have been put on exhibition in London this autumn in shows of notably different ambition and budget, eliciting different levels of media response. The Prince of Wales's 'Vision of Britain', at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 19th November,' exploits a full array of agit-prop techniques - strategically placed television screens, repeated slogans punctuated by bursts of music, visual juxtaposition of the favoured and the condemned, ten commandments emblazoned on banners draped from a skeletal but not so primitive Vitruvian hut. The Romanian nightmare, by contrast, was outlined in a small, unpreten-tious series of photographic images on show at the Royal Fine Art Commission (closed 5th October). More details are given in a recently published book, The Razing of Romania's Past, by Dinu Giurescu, a history professor who recently emigrated to the west with his photographs of Romania's vanishing architectural heritage. 

The Romanian tragedy is made even more poignant by the country's obstinate anachronism. While most of the rest of Europe jumps on the heritage bandwagon, Romania marches out of step into an architectural dystopia of frightening dimensions. Seizing on the damage inflicted by the 1977 earthquake, the government has, since the early 1980s, razed to the ground at least twenty-nine towns, devastated a further thirty-seven, levelled large tracts of the centre of Bucharest and embraced a policy of reducing by half the number of rural villages, replacing them with urban agglomerations of multi-occupied buildings around 'civic centres'. In Bucharest itself ghoulish post-modern apartment blocks are rising alongside vastly widened boule-vards. Not only have listed architectural monuments such as the early eighteenth-century Vacaresti monastery disappeared - described as the most important building of its period in Romania- but the whole urban and rural architectural fabric of the country is under threat. Its highly distinctive character, largely the product of the late nineteenth century and aptly likened to a 'garden city avant la lettre', is recorded in Giurescu's book - low villa-like houses enlivened with eclectic Beaux-arts ornament, two or three-storey houses with turrets and 'neo-Romanian' loggias, leafy side-streets, decorative wrought-iron. This unpretentious but lovable housing - suburbs in urbe - is, where it still survives, punctuated by handsome public buildings and high double-domed churches. 

Romanian art historians and conservators have been powerless in the face of the destruction. The ghastly irony is that the new policy was inaugurated at the very moment that the conservation movement seemed to be gaining official acceptance. In 1975-77 restoration and listing of buildings was at its height, and Romania participated in the international meetings of ICCROM and ICOMOS. But in 1977, the year of the earthquake, the Directorate for National Cultural Patrimony was abolished and conservation brought to a halt. The Vacaresti monastery was demolished in 1984-87 using the same scaffolding that had been erected to complete its restoration. 

In Britain the fight for the cities is now less against planners and social engineers than against road builders and private speculators freed from planning controls. It is courageous of the Prince of Wales to take on both sides with even handed fervour. Ultimately, however, his quarrel is with architects, for 'it was they who set the cultural agenda'. But to debit Le Corbusier with the auto-destructive London tower block, Ronan Point, makes as little sense as to credit Chippendale with the broken pediment of Philip Johnson's AT & T building in New York. The Prince of Wales's analysis is vitiated by his failure to distinguish between good and bad examples of modernist architecture. 

It transpires that the Prince's ten 'principles to build on' are no more than guidelines - 'place', 'materials', 'signs', 'community'. Of those with an implied normative content, 'scale', 'harmony' and 'hierarchy' are perhaps for him the most important. By fitting in, singing in tune, clearly stating a message of what the building is and how you get into it, the architect can't go wrong. But what happens once you're inside? Significantly, given his espousal of Leon Krier, the Prince's principles are all urbanistic, concerned with outer effect, not inner space. Moreover, his call for an architecture parlante is not consistent. For why should it be good for the headquarters of a computer firm to look like a country house (Robert Adam's building at Dogmerfield Park, Hampshire), but bad for Mondial House on the Thames to look like a computer? In fact both buildings are undistinguished, whereas Denys Lasdun's National Theatre, likened by the Prince to a nuclear power station, must be the most unjustly abused building of recent decades. And before we rush to plaster the brutalist concrete fagades of the South Bank with ingratiating ornament, should we not remember the terracotta additions to the east side of Russell Square, added in a similar spirit at the turn of the century? Will the conservationists of the future bless us for eliminating the best of the 1960s along with the worst?