A Waste of Many Things The Demolition of the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens

“Brutalism as Found. Housing, Form, and Crisis at Robin Hood Gardens” (Nicholas Thoburn, Goldsmiths Press, 2022) deals with the controversial case of the social housing complex realized by the Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson in 1972. Located in Poplar, East London, close to Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, the residential estate was composed by 214 maisonettes and single-storey flats in two long curved slab-blocks: both buildings were facing each other and bent at plan following the course of the surrounding roads. Between the two blocks, a multi-level garden emphasized the role of the semi-public space with no parking lots or road traffic. In the twilight of the welfare policies implemented after the Second World War and on the heels of the 1973 oil crisis and subsequent recession, this architecture by the leader of Team 10 is not only their first opportunity to create a council estate (i.e., built by the Greater London Council), but also their only mass-housing scheme. Robin Hood Gardens represents one of the emblematic experiments of the so-called Second Modern, engaged in the attempt to overcome the design rigidity of the Modern Movement.

Thoburn’s book focuses on the process of crisis that decreed the demolition of the two blocks for the realization of the Blackwall Reach residential development project that will provide more than 1,500 new homes. As the result of experimental field research (2014/2022) enhanced by the use of heterogeneous tools (from architectural analysis, social critique, lived testimony, portrait photography, and critical theory), the study underpinning the book moves between architecture and sociology without neglecting to highlight the spatial inventions of the Smithsons, reading in their form qualitative characteristics capable of generating a sense of belonging in the community of residents, mostly coming from a multiracial working class. This is the case of the brutalist language applied by the architects, especially in the use of raw concrete for the construction of the “streets in the sky”: the walkways running the entire length of both blocks at every third floor on the external facades giving access to the houses; these “streets” are semi-public meeting places achieved through the ingenious use of a counter-lever.

The “as found” neologism, coined by the Smithsons in the course of their practice, alludes to a brutalist sensibility, even a method. Rather than relying on predetermined built forms, it establishes an honest relationship with building materials, sites and social conditions. Says Thoburn, “the scheme modulates class society through a set of socio-architectural forms”: while Robin Hood Gardens does not possess a coherent architectural identity, it is an assemblage of forms engaged in the process of deforming themselves, the site and the society that inhabits them. Striving to avert demolition and debating clichés (is Robin Hood Gardens a “concrete monstrosity” or a “modernist masterpiece”?), Thoburn’s research puts the too-often marginalized community of residents at the center and asserts the role of the Smithsons’ work as a topological architecture.

A rich investigative material supports the book and has allowed a varied set of dissemination outcomes. Many of the photos and videos taken during the years of field surveys by Nicholas Thoburn and photographer Kois Miah are collected in an online exhibition (brutalismasfound.co.uk). Through five sections (“Streets in the Sky”, “Ordinariness and Light”, “Concrete, Mass and Repetition”, “The Charged Void”, “Demolition and Afterlife”), the digital exhibition reports the explorations conducted in the years before the demolition, also thanks to the interview work carried out among residents in English and Bengali by researchers Runa Khalique and Aklima Begum.

Significant is also the structure of the book which derives from a fundamental aspect of the study, namely “The modulation of class society in the estate’s architecture”. From this, four major problems emerge that have to do with form: Thoburn calls them street, house, mass and landscape, from which Chapters 3, 4, 7 and 2 descend. Three more Chapters (2, 5, 8) develop tangentially, focusing on Brutalist languages and on the diagrams, collages and drawings the Smithsons conceived to communicate spatial concepts and formal problems. The underlying idea transferred to readers is that of conceiving the book as a building.

The act of demolishing entire architectures or parts of them, inevitably altering their balance and status, is the first stage in a complex process that, not always and not only, leads to physical reconstruction. Well before the actual demolition (approved in 2015 and still ongoing), Robin Hood Gardens was in fact the subject of a mechanism of neglection and disinvestment, symbolizing a brutalist aesthetic to be erased or at least redeemed. A heated debate developed when, following the announcement of the demolition in 2008, Twentieth Century Society and Building Design, supported by international architects such as Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid, launched a campaign for the preservation of the complex, culminating in an application for protected status (rejected in 2015). As Thorburn highlights, this contrasting narrative was later joined by an apparently opposing aesthetic when London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) intervened to save from destruction a three-storey section of the estate. Exhibited at the Pavilion of Applied Arts at the 2018 Venice Biennale, the reassembled fragment of the long-doomed and maligned Robin Hood Gardens was celebrated as a small segment of a masterpiece.

“Brutalism as Found” takes the opportunity of the hotly contested demolition to showcase a new narrative for Robin Hood Gardens. Starting from the observation that the resident community was almost entirely absent from the public debate about the merits, failures and pending demolition of the complex, Thorburn describes Robin Hood Gardens as an extremely pleasant place to live.

While it has been described as “a work of architectural rough poetry, awkward and out of joint”, the estate allowed for the construction of multifaceted social and architectural forms. Its “vastness” made it a village provided with all the commercial and educational services nearby and populated by a heterogeneous community, the garden bordered by the two concrete blocks offered spaces for play and group gatherings even during holidays, often spent in the city. Therefore, the book is a tool to understand the architecture and to bear it into a future after demolition: its aim is to convey “the affective, imagistic and imaginative qualities of the estate and its lived experience”.

In light of this, the destructive act might appear, as in several other contexts similar in time and social background, to be simplistic, even wasteful. As Anne Lacaton stated “[…] demolishing is a decision of easiness and short term. It is a waste of many things – a waste of energy, a waste of material, and a waste of history. Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence.”