When Lord Rogers launched a campaign to save one of London’s most notorious housing estates from demolition, he was adamant that it was a desirable place to live. [...]
It is a claim he may regret. Unhappy residents of the estate have challenged the peer to be true to his word and swap his £12 million Chelsea townhouse for a few nights in one of their blighted flats.
— telegraph.co.uk
Previously: Robin Hood Gardens Set For Demolition
61 Comments
These old modernists live in a world of their own imagination. Talk about nostalgia! Good on the residents for calling him on this.
There's an interesting twist to this story. The architects for the Robin Hood Gardens project were Alison and Peter Smithson. They were the vanguard leaders of the Brutalist movement in England. Well, it seems that the Smithson's son, Simon, is also an architect, and guess where he works....
That's right! Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. All in the family.
Snippet quotes from the article:
“The ceiling is almost constantly leaking. I go to the office straight away and tell them, but then they ask me to fill out another form, and then who knows when someone from maintenance will actually come round."
“There’s asbestos, the lifts are dirty, there’s no security. I’m embarrassed to say that I live here and to invite my friends to my home – not because it’s a council flat, but because it’s so disgusting and there is such a stigma attached to living here. "
It's a 43 year old building. Asbestos was OK when it was built. Dirty elevators? No Security? Unresponsive maintenance and management?
How are any of these the architect's fault? These are actually social problems. Crime: Contact the Metropolitan Police - I believe the number in Britain is 999. And dirty elevators? Shame on you Lord Fancy Pants for not knowing how to properly design a self-cleaning elevator.
Was watching a thing about Lord Spencer (Diana's brother) and his Althorp estate. Guess what? His roof leaked. So he put a new roof on.
The profession of Architects need to stop being the whipping boy for all of the social ills that befall people. The profession needs to stand up and point out that a building will not solve your problems, but will provide a place where you can solve your problems. People blame the architect for things WELL outside of the purview of the designer and no one rebuts them - then it is just accepted as true that the architecture failed.
This makes architects look like ninnies and then no one wants to pay a professional wage for the work that is actually done.
Sorry. Post too long.
Not too long, Menona. All good points.
I agree - you cannot blame 30 odd years of willful neglect and Thatcherite disinvestment in social housing as the fault of the Smithsons (or Rogers for that matter). I will not suggest that these people are without shortcomings, but we really have to frame this as a discussion of larger trends in society where public subsidies to the rich have become the norm, foodstamps are cut and all assistance to the poor frowned on. That is what has happened in the US and the UK, and this is a hypocrisy which needs to be turned around.
When will governments - and our taxes - work for us again; when will cities and towns have capable planning departments and funds for housing again? Look at the aftermath of Katrina, everybody now expects developers to provide the answers, with the predictable result that virtually nothing has been built. It is a shambolic situation.
As Frampton said when he was called out on the neglect of a housing project he helped design: "We did not expect the people living in it to get poorer and poorer." That has been a striking reality for most people, even for the middle class.
We really need to turn that downward spiral around but blaming architects is way too superficial and uninformed. If I were Rogers, I'd take them up on their offer and take the Borough of Tower Hamlets and the central government to town on this. Let the gloves come off.
It's important to note that the residents quoted in that article also point out design deficiencies, such as strange planning of the units, and mechanical and plumbing systems that were difficult to access and service. So their complaints were about design, as well as deferred maintenance.
Is it? Is it important to notice that? Or are you putting words in peoples' mouth like you usually do? Is there anything about the alienating architecture of nihilism in the article?
Did you read the article?
"Shamin Sattar, 25, a British Airways worker who lives on the estate with her family, said: “First of all, [Rogers] needs to know that the structure of this building is messed up. They're badly designed - our flat has the sitting room upstairs and then one of the bedrooms next to the kitchen. That doesn't make sense."
Note it... Or not, I don't really care.
Are you planning on jumping down my throat in a knee-jerk way every time I post here? Just want to know what I should expect.
Another resident from the interwebs:
“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”
I've never had a knee-jerk reaction to your posts. Its usually more disgust and disbelief.
ALIEN ARCHITECTURE OF NIHILISM. talk about knee-jerk reactions.
As I said above, I was talking about the article posted here. I was under the impression that's what we were discussing.
BTW, the "alien architecture of nihilism" thing was intended as tongue-in-cheek.
Naturally with demographic changes and changing housing expectations people will want different things than in the 1970s. What is strange though is that when there is a dilapidated Victorian housing estate with social problems people will call it a slum, but never actually blame it on the architects. When it is a modernist housing project people are suddenly up in arms to suggest that it is the fault of the architects that there are social and maintenance issues.
What's that all about?
Here is some more food for thought... you can actually lower the welfare bill (aka housing benefits) by supplying affordable housing:
http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/jun/19/experts-social-housing-investment-lower-welfare-bill?CMP=new_1194&CMP=
Amazing to read defenses of tenants criticisms as simply being due to neglect. Was it neglect that kept people coming back to the city's traditional buildings and renovating them from with-in an inch of their lives? I don't see anyone caring about these de-humanizing hulks but the very profession that designed them.
Of course architects aren't going to solve social problems, but any objective reading of this situation will note that these types of buildings, both in form and style, are inherently repellant to all those who have a choice. We shoved those in who didn't have a choice into the kind of buildings that the very architects themselves avoided like the plague. These buildings where built from a well intentioned impulse, no doubt, but it behooves our profession to recognize the design failures these buildings represented.
This is the kind of thing that makes us loose respect in the eyes of the public. We live in a world of our own making when we should be one of the most empathetic professionals out there. It's frustrating all the good we can be doing while still dithering about outdated and discredited ideologies. Oh well...
But saying that these types of buildings are always failures due to their form and style is untrue. There are many brutalist and modern residential towers in big cities that charge high rents or mortgages and are highly sought after by wealthy city dwellers.
which are the outdated and discredited ideologies? the knee-jerk hatred of modernism? that its dehumanizing?
hi eke!
there's been scads of article written and RHG recently. not sure why anyone should limit the discussion to simply the most recent. And im not sure about the whole 'tongue in cheek' thing. you pick - and cherry pick - every opportunity you can to throw mud on modernism's delicious white walls. I think you've got a vitriolic anger about it. you accused Danny L of delighting in scaring people - that's just childish, weird, crazy, sophomoric, I dunno. pick an adjective. I gotta go get some work done. Here's to hoping you're spending your day making excellent architecture.
Looking at the planning of this building closely (which I did for the first time today), I will say that from an abstract, diagrammatic standpoint, the planning of the building is quite interesting. The way that alternating, adjacent units interlock in the vertical dimension is really clever, and a great way to get wider units in less footprint. But a clever diagram doesn't mean that you end up with a building that is a nurturing, desirable place for people to live.
I would never say that modernist social housing is always a failure. But I will say that this building is really ugly, and, well... brutal. It feels more like a prison cell block than a place people would call home. Right down to the maximum-security precast wall at the perimeter... it really looks forbidding to me:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.509762,-0.010075,3a,75y,26.66h,91.88t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1syMjiK9AulgHoWrIeJk7ELg!2e0!3e5!7i13312!8i6656
No matter how much vacant lawn space you put between the buildings, they still look like filing cabinets for humans - which is exactly the wrong message to send to the working poor, who we are trying to help with this kind of social housing.
That surrounding wall is definitely technically interesting but horribly bad urbanistically. Yeeks.
I would say "brutalism" and "dehumanizing" go together very well. It is depressing that an architect designed this.
At some point this will be renovated, I'm guessing, but it will no longer be publicly-supported housing. And it will become desirable and hip and cool to live there. And then it will be part of the conversation about gentrification.
As some have pointed out above, this is a policy problem. The building(s) can be desirable if supported and socialized in a way that makes them attractive. As long as they're poorly maintained, secured, and stigmatized, they'll be in jeopardy of teardown.
Americans and British seem to have a way of automatically stigmatizing public housing. Maybe because we stop maintaining it appropriately after the first capital expense? It seems like Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, and other European countries I've visited handle this better (independent of the architectural character of the places), so what can we learn from them?
Will we say the same about The Interlace by OMA and Buro Ole Scheeren in 30 years? Or is it just the fact that is "housing"? and somebody is trying to make room for their latest ROI?
I'll stay there. Sign me up (and give me access to some tools and a decent table saw). The problem with these projects is the concept of publicly supported housing (not a bad idea, just a bad role for government)...
There's a real danger here also for the profession in this exchange. That an architect (any architect) is challenged with the "would you want to live here... based on these conditions" question, and then even responds to the question is a problem.
The accusation is: This Architecture is terrible. The Architect is to Blame.
The supporting evidence is: crime, filth, poor management, etc.
[The "bedroom next to the dining room" is a design criticism, but really how many apartments have I (and you dear architect reader) lived in where a designer was shoving the proverbial ten pound into the five pound bag, that didn't have ideal and perfect design allowances? Hmmm? You may be in one right now.]
The fact that an architect responds to the accusation based on the supporting evidence as presented gives validity to the accusation. That's a problem. A very subtle problem. The correct response, is the lawyer-ly one: I don't accept the premise of your question.
Allowing this discussion, or levy of accusations, against the profession based on a false set of premises degrades the position and regard of the profession by the public at large. Then we wonder when no one wants to pay for design services.
Not everyone gets to live in a magic palace in the sky. Yes, Robin Hood Residents, being poor sucks - ask any architect.
According to Wikipedia, it is Zaha's "favourite building in London".
Slow clap for that post, Menona.
clean out the poor people remodel the building and rent/sell it to the wealthy and all will be good. poor people are constantly destroying good architecture. poor people is why we can't have nice things.
(Also I want to point out that for elderly and less-mobile people a bedroom close to the living spaces and on the same level is a blessing.)
The town of Bath in Somerset shows what the Brits can do with high-density housing when they have architects who give a shit and know what they are doing. Bath was heavily bombed in WW II and rebuilt to its current state. Where is the Luftwaffe when you actually need them? http://1drv.ms/1QROKw1
Typo in above
http://1drv.ms/1QROkw1
Who here thinks this project is a particularly laudable piece of architecture? Or are you all just circling the wagons?
(BTW, slow clap for Volunteer. Bath is wonderful )
Why the fuck are we wanting to preserve this piece of shit building? The world changes, and so should we. This aint (and will never be) the Chartres cathedral.
Reminds me of this stupid feature:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/05/t-magazine/architects-libeskind-zaha-hadid-selldorf-norman-foster.html?_r=0
Looking at the building again, I do not understand why someone in their right minds would want to preserve it. Blame the architect or not, its an ugly monstrosity that should be blasted right off the face of the city.
Thank you sameolddoctor. It's those who need to make this a political issue when it's a human issue. I love these debates, because they highlight how isolated the architectural elite are from issues on the ground. Someday, the profession will focus back on the user's needs over their own ideological positions. For those who've staked their claim on the old regime, this must be a distressing time.
BOTH sides are circling wagons, Thayer, be honest. Some of us are quoting residents who like it, some residents who don't. The point is we should be able to have a conversation about the merits of saving it based on far bigger questions than just "Does Jane Doe like it?" (whatever "like" means in this context).
The Brutalist public housing tower in my city is awful, and evern though it was done by a well-known and revered local architect, I wouldn't cry if it was torn down (it's clunky on the outside and the units are cramped on the inside). The Brutalist Federal building three blocks away is gorgeous and fantastic and absolutely worth every penny of preservation that has been spent on it.
....and PS architecture IS a political issue, every decision about how we as a society live is a political issue, to pretend otherwise is burying your head in the sand.
My issue with this kind of thing centers around a couple of things. First thing: If you're going to criticize architecture, do so based on the merits/deficiencies of the architecture. By engaging an architect in the discussion ("Would you want to live here?"), this raises the level of criticism into the realm of the discipline. I'm sorry but, "It's Dirty" isn't a valid architectural criticism.
So if they raze this hulk (because of the filth and poor management) and build something frilly with bricks and cornices and lipstick and false eyelashes, in a few years when they've neglected it in the same ways - it's going to be a shit hole too. The problem with a shit hole isn't the hole - it's the stuff inside it. If one doesn't clean the human effluvia out of the hole, it's not going to be pleasant, regardless of whether it's a brutalist hole or not. The basic argument in the article blames the hole. Not the hole's fault.
Poor people generally don't have the means to keep up a place. It's expensive and time consuming. Poor people frequently don't have extra time or money. Then add to that, the fact that the dregs usually settle to the bottom. So that part of the population who is deep into that one side of the bell curve contains your a higher density of the mentally deficient and "Hoarder-type". More of those in the public housing than in the (insert name of swanky London neighborhood here). That's not going to help. The crazies are too busy yelling at the light switch to clean their place.
My second issue is the wastefulness of the call for blasting out this whole thing in order to rebuild it with another thing (regardless of style). Think of all the embodied energy in something of that size. All the workman's lunches and "petrol" to get to the jobsite for the workers and materials that are already embodied in that existing structure. Regardless of the relative cost in financial terms of a teardown/rebuild, to a gutting/refurbishing - all of that "stuff" that currently stands up and keeps people out of the weather (fix the roof already) would be wasted. Into a landfill somewhere. It's just wasteful. No one argues that they can't live there - they just don't like living there. Huge difference.
I live near a place where they just demolished 240 units of low income housing (built about 100 years ago) to rebuild it with 270 units of "New" low-income housing - at a projected cost of $100 million. It comes to around $370K per new unit of "Low Income" housing. So they wasted all of the existing homes that people have lived in for a century to rebuild pretty much the same damn thing. $100 million for an additional 30 units?
Now this project that I'm describing is one of those things that is really probably fraught with corruption and people's pockets being lined, but it's the same kind of thing that is surrounding this "Robin Hood" business. Wastefulness. Inexcusable.
Now... this one was too long.
Donna,
I don't know if both sides are circling the wagons because the modernists are the majority in most institutions while traditionalists are on the fringes. I think there's room for both, even though I tend to like traditional work more. Recently I've been working on a "contemporary" home, and found that materiality is a lot more important when the forms are dumb and don't relate beyond a Mondrian or cubist ensemble. People will express themselves in whatever language they speak or are forced to speak.
I agree that everything has a political dimension, but only to the degree that you allow it to have. In other words, if I want to hand food out to the hungry, the right might say I'm hobbling people's free will, while the left might say that's a model of food distribution. I say it's the right thing to do regardless of the politics, but others will force their view upon me.
I think public housing is a good thing, I simply want us to learn from mistakes and listen to what the users say. Sticking them in a highrise isolated from the larger fabric is just bad sociologically and psychologically. I learned this reading the follow up reports on those communities demolished during Robert Moses's era, but I think I knew it instinctively also.
Plus, as much as I actually like Brutalism's structural gymnastics, as opposed to the International style's way of hiding the structure and making everything look like it's levitating, that's not what makes a home feel good.
So how can the townhouses along the crescents in Bath, many designed and built in the 1700s, be more attractive, livable, and desirable than what we have here? Did no one think what a gray, concrete, water and soot-stained Brutalist building would look like in London? I have seen photos of bombed-out buildings in Beriut that were more attractive.
The thing about historic structures (olde-timey townhouses) is that when they were built, they weren't built to be dependent on mechanical systems.
So if the AC kicks out in a place that was designed (through necessity) to be naturally ventilated, then you open the windows and let the air flow through. And the windows will be big because they didn't have fluorescent lights. The ceilings will be high because it cooled the place in summer. No elevators for the homeless guys to pee in either.
Also, the Bath townhouses were not public housing when they were built. They were for the Richie-Riches. The 1700s equivalent to the Robin Hood places would be unbearable and may not still exist anywhere I would imagine.
So in Modern buildings, they are designed to be dependent upon mechanical systems. Mechanical systems require maintenance and upkeep. If the maintenance isn't done, the systems fail and the quality of life within the structures suffers.
This is the issue that Modern buildings are susceptible to.
Another example is: Stephen Hawking.
In the 1700's, he doesn't live to be 30 years old.
Today, thanks to Modernism, he's 110 years old and rarin' to go. Wrote books even.
But if he's not cared for, and doesn't have his mechanical systems attended to...
...people will say he's not nice, and call for him to be demolished and replaced with Jim Parsons (who isn't REALLY a scientist - just a pretend scientist). "Dress him up Like Isaac Newton!" they'll clamor. "Now Learn Us Some Science!"
Everything that is wrong with the buildings themselves can be fixed. I don't like their brutalist aesthetic, nor do I think it is appropriate for social housing, however demolition does not actually solve the problem, it just moves it elsewhere. Robin Hood Gardens was the replacement for former slum on the site. Is the correct solution really to keep demolishing these places as soon as they acquire problems?
Menona,
You've just outlined one of the best arguments for emulating traditional architecture besides it having produced the most cherished sites in the built world. Not that I'm going to turn off my AC or start using the out-house, but all those aspects of traditional buildings like good cross ventilation and adequate natural light, (not a green house) are things that make people happy, because they keep us in closer contact to our actual ecosystem, ie, not virtual reality.
Why not take the best of our modern systems and blend it with the best of the past so there's some resilience built into our environment. It might come in handy sooner than we think, plus it makes for really nice towns.
chessterfish,
How many of those "slum sites' are now hipstervilles? Come on now, I thought we killed that stupid modernist meme a long time ago. Lower east side anybody?
That's a big 10-4 T. D.
I'm all for light and natural ventilation. The less dependent on systems I am, the better. I've got the AC off and windows open right now. But when you go into these types of things, then you're always up against the value engineers and the social outcry (like with prisons).
The "value engineers" (we need an appropriate derogatory term for these people) will say, "buy smaller windows, save 33%" and "you only need 7.5' ceilings on each floor, etc." then if you actually make public housing nice (unless you're in Scandinavia) all the "hardworking job-creators" will say, "That place is nicer than where I live! And those people are POOR! How DARE they?" This is, again, actually a social problem. People concerned more about the "Me" than recognizing they are part of a "We".
I think the article has the person saying, "I'm embarrassed to admit I live in a Council Flat" or something along those lines. There's no call from the community that says, "We shouldn't allow our most fragile citizens to be subjected to neglect and squalor." When has that statement ever been made and heeded in human history?
But putting up a brick veneer so that something can look "traditional" is, again, wasteful in terms of material, energy, resources, and labor. Make your rain-screen out of recyclable metal panels. The "Sheldon Cooper-ing" of contemporary architecture (where a thing pretends to be something it is not) is a bad idea.
Deploying efficient design strategies is a great idea. But it may cost a few more pennies. People will pick a fight about them. Prepare yourself.
that would be a great design competition; remodel robin hood gardens to a contemporary livable state. crow fund it.
*crowd
The real title of the Telegraph piece should be:
Residents of Robin Hood Estate DON'T ask Lord Richard Rogers, architect & Pritzker Prize Laureate, and his firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners to renovate and refurbish their dilapidated Council lodgings, but instead call out to him to "spend a night here" as some sort of "Fonzie & the Shark Tank" gimmick to highlight their blight and (hopefully) get some shiny new digs... with a pediment maybe.
I'm not so good at writing headlines. Is it too wordy? Or too sarcastic?
I don't think it is a gimmick; I think it is a crime to put women and children in this dudgeon.
Reading some more about this project I found out that when it was finished they put all the leftover debris in giant mounds between the two monolith buildings. Any kids that wanted to play soccer here or almost any games requiring only a flat field have been just shit out of luck since it was built. If you look at the greens between the buildings of Oxford and Cambridge universities they are as flat as a flounder and as green as Ireland and accessed by arches through the buildings. Not a garbage mound in sight. Why not? Were the architects that designed Robin Hood just complete assholes too fucking cheap to haul away their trash?
I saw a few published design renderings from the Smithsons that showed that the big mounds in the lawns were a planned design feature. Did they PLAN to bury the construction trash between the buildings? That's not clear...
The problem is that it's not privately owned housing,
Everything public is bad.
Everything public is bad.
Sure...good luck paving your roads and putting off your fires.....
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