Last November the Victoria and Albert Museum in London announced that it had acquired a threestorey section of Robin Hood Gardens, the social housing estate located in Poplar, East London, designed by British architects Alison and Peter Smithson.
The acquisition - comprising both exterior facades and interiors of a maisonette flat - was carried out in partnership with Swan Housing Association, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, the Mayor of London and Muf architecture/art.
The structure is now heading to the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (from 26th May to 25th November) where it will be on display at the Applied Arts Pavilion in the Sale d'Armi at the Arsenale.
This special event marks a return to the Biennale for the Smithsons: in 1976 they went to Venice where they showcased billboard-size images of the buildings in progress and a bench that looked like the fins that characterised the buildings, with the caption "A building under assembly is a ruin in reverse". The caption inspired the title for the Biennale showcase - "Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin In Reverse".
A social architecture experiment, the Robin Hood Gardens complex was built by the Greater London Council (GLC) and later transferred to the local authority of Tower Hamlets. It was designed in 1968 and completed in 1972 and was a perfect example of New Brutalism, characterised by a horizontal layout and divided in two 10 and 7 storey high stark concrete buildings.
This was the first and last council estate project by Alison and Peter Smithson, but it remained an important one for some of its features, including the noise-reducing elements like the exterior concrete fins, and the elevated walkways, known as "streets in the sky" and intended to encourage interaction between neighbours. For the husband-and-wife team the building was a "demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living (…) a new mode of urban organisation."
In 2015, the application to give Robin Hood Gardens listed status was turned down and it was announced that it would have been demolished: architect Richard Rogers wrote a letter signed by Zaha Hadid, Robert Venturi and Toyo Ito against the decision, but a while back it was announced that it will definitely be demolished as part of a £300m redevelopment scheme and the flats will be replaced with over 1,500 new homes.
In Venice the section of Robin Hood Gardens will be recreated on a scaffold, designed by ARUP with Muf architecture/art: visitors will be able to walk inside the structure, observe the position of the bedrooms and the way they were protected from the noises of the street and of the external corridors along the building, conceived as a shared and common space for the inhabitants.
New visual work by Korean visual artist Do Ho Suh will contribute to give visitors the impression of going through the building and getting to know the lives of the people who once occupied it. Rather than just enjoying the project, visitors may want to consider the pros and cons of such a display.
Some critics considered indeed the acquisition of a piece of social housing as controversial: the V&A collection boasts the 17th-century timber facade of Sir Paul Pindar's House in Bishopsgate, London, and the gilded Music Room salvaged from Norfolk House in St. James's Square, London. Yet, while museums can't express opinions about saving a building (but can claim they are acquiring sections of them for future generation...) in the case of this project you naturally wonder if the museum was just interested in the preservation aspect and did not take into consideration the human aspect and the vicissitudes of the residents who lost their council tenancies when it was decided to demolish the structure (besides, you naturally wonder if demolishing council estates will imply that future generation will be left with just pictures, fragments and videos, rather than with tangible buildings, to learn more about these structures).
Hopefully, the fragment of Robin Hood Gardens at the Venice Biennale may not end up being considered as just another installation by visitors who will eventually be prompted to discover more about the people who lived there and the architecture of state-built council housing.
After all, Dr Christopher Turner, Keeper of the Design, Architecture and Digital Department at the V&A, stated in a press release about the project: "This three-storey section of Robin Hood Gardens (...) is an object that will stimulate debate around architecture and urbanism today - it raises important questions about the history and future of housing in Britain, and what we want from our cities."
The project goes certainly well with the main theme of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale - "Freespace" - launched by curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara and questioning the quality of space, open and free space and the presence/absence of architecture.
Fashion designers looking for inspirations shouldn't dismiss such a project: the pre-Spring-Summer 19 collection by Irene Kostas' Helsinki-based label ONAR is for example inspired by city moods. Moving from the urban photographs of Eoin McLoughlin, the collection is indeed based on what we may define as a council estate palette of black, foggy grey and phantom green with just a splash of solar yellow. In a nutshell, inspiration may come from the most unlikely places, even from brutalist ones.
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