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Beginning with his famous tongue-lashing of a proposed modernist extension to London's National Gallery almost 25 years ago, Prince Charles has made something of a career of attacking British modern and post-modern architecture. Most of his deliverances on these topics are not to be taken seriously. From time to time, however, the Prince touches a nerve, and, though his argument is muddled, he's managed to do exactly that in a new article published in Britain's House & Garden magazine.

In his foreword to a green living supplement, Prince Charles takes up his old neo-traditionalist cudgel against architects who design the kinds of modernist buildings he intensely dislikes.

"It would seem," he writes, "that the emergent climate-change agenda seems to have offered licence to another generation of architects and designers bent on further divorcing us - through random and untested building shapes and types - from our deeply-rooted connection with Nature's ordering systems which remain true to the rule of climate and season."

He continues: "Why, I must ask, does being 'green' mean building with glass and steel and concrete and then adding wind turbines, solar panels, water heaters, glass atria - all the paraphernalia of a new "green building industry" - to offset buildings that are inefficient in the first place?"

It's almost too easy to dismiss the prince's sentiments in these lines.

In the first place, the nascent green-building industry in Britain, and everywhere else, deserves more respect than Prince Charles gives it. The enterprise is certainly about more than tacking "paraphernalia" on energy-squandering structures. It involves making the buildings themselves better, through new technologies of glass, steel and other materials.

Also, the prince overlooks, as he often does, the fact that contemporary cities can't be built of timber, wattle and daub, or the other traditional cottage materials for which he has great affection. The job to be done is not to rid the cities of glass, steel and concrete, but to put those materials to work in ways that honour the environment and conserve precious energy. Which is exactly what the green building industry he spurns is trying to do.

But a little farther on in his article, the prince says that people "need to resist the urge to seize on slick, highly marketed techno-fixes" as solutions to the problem of poor environmental design.

Here, I think, he is onto something more important than his usual (and usually ill-considered) traditionalism. His advice made me wonder how committed to sustainability developers and architects really are. In a world of home-buyers newly anxious about the environment, some suppliers of housing must surely be tempted to add on a few energy-saving gadgets, then use these puny embellishments to market their product. As one developer after another has told me, sustainability helps sell houses. The danger is that much-hyped "techno-fixes" will deceive purchasers into believing that what they're getting is far greener than it actually is.

I may be over-rating this threat. Over the last few months, I have written up several new residential projects that claim to be greener than conventional buildings. They will almost certainly deliver the goods. The use of steel framing in some of these low-rise buildings, for example, is expensive these days, but steel bones are wholly recyclable and relatively low on waste, while wood is neither. In its current state of technical refinement - Prince Charles is right about this - the conventional all-glass high-rise wall leaks energy badly. So it makes sense to reduce glass surface coverage, as architects are doing in several new Toronto projects I have written about, and make more and better use of opaque cladding.

But despite the significant green moves certain designers and developers are making nowadays, new-housing buyers, and the rest of us, need to remain vigilant about the claims of marketers. When purchasing a new home that is advertised as green, we should demand facts and figures, even scientific data, to back up the oft-heard assertions that this or that feature of the construction or outfitting is merciful on the natural environment.

And the public should especially support initiatives, in both government and the private sector, aimed at developing new and more efficient building technologies. The environmental ball is very much in the court of the engineers and inventors. We can demand a greener earth as loudly as we like, and recycle as conscientiously as we can, but unless the technicians come up with more sustainable materials and building systems, the world's burgeoning cities will remain the energy and resource-wasting places they are.

Prince Charles writes in his House & Garden article: "We must act now by using traditional methods and materials to work with Nature rather than against Her." As far as cities are concerned, he is wrong. What's needed are innovative technologies - materials never before seen, methods that are daring - if we are to achieve the harmony with nature that the Prince, and many others, believe is urgently necessary.