Red Brick Extraction
The Robin Hood Gardens controversy has elicited some of the most interesting debate among the architecture blogs in a long time: Kosmograd sceptical, Fantastic Journal even more sceptical, with Homo Ludens and City of Sound being much more pro the whole campaign. My own position is somewhere between the latter two. Without wanting to slight a brilliant post, there's a hint in the COS post, and in lots of the contributions to the BD petition in the first place, that Park Hill or Keeling House, with their Alsopification and Gated-Community fate respectively, are in some way a good model - and along with this a denigration of the tenants, somehow unfit to live in such an ambitious building. What I find especially sad about this - true as it might be, and certainly in the 70s the building was riven with vandalism - is that Brutalism was the nearest architecture ever got to a culture of, not a culture for, the working class. This was always messy and contradictory, and certainly not an exact symbiosis, but read Banham's The New Brutalism (if you can get hold of a copy) and you can't miss the class issues running through it - the brutalists as products of class mobility, working class and petit-bourgeois, of 'red-brick extraction', infatuated with shiny popculture and technology and hostile to welfare state philanthropism, if not to socialism.
'A building for the socialist dream, which is something different to building for the socialist state' was the Smithsons' description of Robin Hood Gardens. RHG was robbing the rich to give to the poor, and to reverse this would be a tragedy, one to which demolition might even be preferable. Though this isn't to support the East London Advertiser's demand to 'TEAR IT DOWN'...which might have a little to do with who their advertisers are. (may I add there's lots about this in the forthcoming book?)
'A building for the socialist dream, which is something different to building for the socialist state' was the Smithsons' description of Robin Hood Gardens. RHG was robbing the rich to give to the poor, and to reverse this would be a tragedy, one to which demolition might even be preferable. Though this isn't to support the East London Advertiser's demand to 'TEAR IT DOWN'...which might have a little to do with who their advertisers are. (may I add there's lots about this in the forthcoming book?)
* Actually since I started writing the above, there's been an excellent post on 'Complexity and Contradiction' in the Smithsons' work at Fantastic Journal - convincingly classing their Sugden House as Pop architecture. There's a difference between pop and postmodernism though, and for me this is exemplified by the differences between the detailing of the Sugden house (ostensibly bare and conformist, but with those huge, odd windows throwing it off-centre) and the Venturi-Scott-Brown house at the end, where the windows make references, borrow old forms. One uses conformism as a deceptive strategy, the other just seems to reinforce it...
posted by owen hatherley at 4:33 pm
9 Comments:
I knew I was gonna get in trouble for that last bit. It was all going so well up till then and I had to go and ruin it!
Sorry! Someone needs to defend Venturi & Scott-Brown. It's not going to be me, but I'm glad someone's doing it. And at least they could string a good sentence together, however strongly I may disagree with said sentences.
Cheers Owen, excellent post yourself. I would quibble that I certainly never implied that the 'fate' of Park Hill - it's too early to tell on that - meant that the original tenants were unsuitable in some way. Not at all. In fact, I picked up Stephen Bayley in my piece when he did appear to suggest that, with ref. to RHG.
My point is simply that both these buildings - RHG and Park Hill - should be renovated, as they do stand for great civic architecture in essence. They were poorly implemented - before, during and after. But a) it's far more sustainable to adapt what's there than build anew, and b) they're both fantastic, brave buildings at core. The problem I tried to point to was one of lack of ongoing care after completion - of seeing architecture as a one-hit building job rather than an ongoing service. (I also saw that close up in Manchester, at the Hulme Crescents that I witnessed the demolition of. They weren't as good, but it's funny how they don't come up at all anymore.)
On the question of the tenants, the point about 'an architecture for the working class' is definitely interesting, but out of time now. So the question remains as to who goes in it. I'd vote for a very varied tenancy, but one qualified by whether they want to live in high-density civic architecture. In that sense, the current tenants are probably the best bet, and should enjoy a better quality of life enabled by a more careful and sensitive understanding of how to service this kind of urban place.
Out of time how? Obviously there's no political party that speaks for it anymore, but that doesn't mean the working class ceased to exist. Though my point here was more that welfare state architecture was usually an architecture for, but almost never an architecture of - and brutalism came closest to that, which makes it especially sad that it gets so reviled. But really, have poverty, bad housing, inequality, class, all disappeared without my noticing?
I agree with most of yr last para though, with the qualification that (as per this Homo Ludens post) new council housing must be built, not least so that those who don't want to don't have to live in places as (let's face it) fierce and uncompromising as RHG, can live somewhere that makes less of a fuss about itself if necessary.
The problem is that (irrespective of how out of time this may seem to some) there is still huge demand for social housing which is nowhere near being met. Of course the increasingly crazed privatisations of anything remotely resembling a social purpose (cf - Park Hill) aren't exactly helping matters here.
I never meant any actual people ceased to exist (nor said that). Clearly, any basic understanding of Britain suggests that inequality, poverty, social exclusion and bad housing are all too evident. But I personally think 'an architecture for the working class' - what I said - as a genuinely useful term would be 'out of time', yes. I can't see it being anything in terms of self-identification, purpose and meaning for a broad mass of the population, and certainly not when it comes to who social housing should be designed for/with.
"Poverty, bad housing, and inequality" are different, though. And that's what I'm more interested in discussing. Of course high quality social housing should be built, and in a variety of typologies, as befits context, people etc. That's an entirely different matter to RHG, which is a very specific case. Just as FAT's work in Manchester is an entirely different case again (interested in your thoughts on that).
My post was really about adaptive reuse of buildings that are still potentially useful; about the importance of modern - inc. brutalist architecture - over and above a particular and subjective understanding of 'taste' that will soon be outmoded; density and shared civic spaces and services; and that social housing is a process, not the installation of some bricks and mortar (oh and some guff about digital models). I wasn't hoping to extrapolate that up to what social housing in general should be at all. Just as I, or an actual architect, wouldn't design RHG or Park Hill given a blank canvas now.
So there's no reason why the specific cases of Park Hill/RHG - part-privatisations, certainly, in the case of Park Hill - should have any impact on the demand for social housing at all. They're two different matters, and while it's instructive to look at the reasons why RHG/Park Hill went wrong, they should be treated as two entirely different things from an urban point-of-view.
It could be worse, having just read this about Cabrini-Green in Chicago, which shows the inherent problem of 'mixed-income' redevelopments gone bad. This is possibly more pertinent to the problem of Park Hill and RHG - leaving aside how screwed up many American cities are - and there's a telling line that American cities have been "better at mixing out the poor than mixing them in", and that's led to a "purging of the poor". The following is, to me, more of a valid warning shot:
"Recent research shows that two-thirds of the Housing Authority tenants who apply for mixed-income units are finding their applications denied, for a growing number of reasons (poor credit, a history of late rent payment, family members with criminal records). When the Plan came to Cabrini, all lease-abiding residents were given a legal “right to return” to a new apartment on-site, but those who didn’t want to wait years for a new home, or who feared they wouldn’t qualify, could take a rent subsidy voucher, called a Section 8, and live elsewhere. More than 80 percent of the tenants who opted for this voucher have moved to areas of Chicago more segregated, isolated, and poor than Cabrini had been."
Points mostly taken, sorry if I sounded a little brackish earlier, and thanks for the link. The adaptive reuse question is especially key...on demand, though, surely when there's still a huge waiting list (as there is in Sheffield and in London), then the part-privatisation of a huge council scheme is going to have a pretty disastrous effect, with more people in worse conditions as an immediate, knock-on effect?
As for my thoughts on 'New Islington'...another time perhaps!
No worries, as we say 'down here' in Sydney.
And your point on the immediate knock-on is key. Perhaps there should be requirement to build the equal and opposite amount of quality housing to deal with any possible displacement - a bit like the requirement to spend 1% on public art, but rather more, well, useful.
Intrigued, RE New Islington (though that's the name of the wider scheme and nothing to do with FAT, I think). I saw it when it was a building site, and couldn't quite make up my mind. But apparently residents are in and enjoying it, and it's certainly nothing like RHG/Park Hill. I loved the old warehouses and factories I used to wonder around up there - a horribly nostalgic feeling, my mind full of imagined images and sounds of when they were a genuine, noisy, life-filled workshop rather than near-derelict husks, for all the good that would do - that Woodward Place was a shock. But Woodward Place replaced worse housing, built after the industrial fabric (replacing slums), and those warehouses elsewhere in Manchester are now almost all converted 'unaffordable housing' - with a few wisely saved back for managed workspaces. So FAT's scheme has a lot going for it, as much as I struggle with the aesthetic. I hope it works out.
You should also get up to Sheffield and Manchester some day, you southern fop ;-) It's quite different up there, and not at all grim. Well, it is sometimes, obviously. It is Britain. But you'd like it.
There is Livingstone's 'affordable housing' clause, but it's well documented how much of a farce that has become. There really has to be some new proper municipal building with protected rents and no backdoor private skullduggery - it's not as if the money isn't there.
I keep meaning to go up north, honest...Money is tight rahnd ere what with 90 quid a week rents on shacks above chipshops. I am going to Salford in May for a conference on the Fall, if I can scrape the fare together. It does irritate me that it's cheaper to go off to Berlin on Ryanair than to the other side of England on the choo-choo... Of course I'd like any grimness - I always imagine Manchster as a city produced by Martin Hannett, and obviously I know it won't be. Abt the FAT scheme, all I know about it is via a Guardian piece and a conversation with Tim Abrahams, but I have seen the pictures. But I don't want to get politics and aesthetics too tied up here - certainly I'm not against decorated sheds as social housing in principle...
Manchester was produced by Martin Hannett in parts, but bear in mind other bits were also being produced by Pete Waterman, at the exact same time. South Manchester was being produced by Godley and Creme, which is alright.
Berlin's probably better, on the whole. That's produced by Brian Eno, Holger Czukay and Burnt Friedman.
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