Blackwall Reach Regeneration Storms Ahead!
So, the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens can now go freely ahead. I can't say I'm surprised. Now we're mulling over the aftermath of this sorry affair, can we have a moratorium on a few tics of rhetoric? Like: 'well if the architects like it so much, why don't they live in it?' Tower Hamlets Council do not give priority to architects on the housing waiting list. Indeed, whether even the most unemployable architect could get onto even the lowest, Band C wait-for-50 years rung of the list is pretty fucking unlikely. Nonetheless, there's a long history of Modernist architects being quite content to live in the buildings they designed - from Hans Scharoun staying for 20 years in one of the flats he planned in Berlin-Siemensstadt and then moving up the road to his freshly designed towers in Charlottenburg, to Neave Brown building a block of private flats to the exact same specifications as his Camden Council blocks to make entirely clear that he or anyone else would be glad to live there; to Erno Goldfinger's spell in Balfron Tower (admittedly brief, but somehow a man with his own self-designed house in Hampstead doesn't seem to me to be priority for social housing).
Even when they're not living in blocks of flats, much-reviled architects from Basil Spence to the Smithsons have designed entirely Modernist houses for themselves to live in. Meanwhile, before the War, Modernism in Britain was an almost 100% middle class movement - by, and for the progressive bourgeoisie. No-one other than the most silly of architectural traditionalists seriously argues that Highpoint or Embassy Court were barbaric barracks - they were well-appointed, intelligently planned housing that just happened to be designed by people who didn't believe that the 19th century represented the pinnacle of human achievement. When the designers of interwar flats for intellectuals started designing flats for workers they usually tried to maintain exactly the same standards. The idea that the profession all live in swanky Victorian houses in Chelsea (that's just Richard Rogers) while designing concrete monstrosities to impose their socialistic fantasies on the proletariat is a bizarre myth that needs to put to rest.
Also, the quoting of authorities or the invocation of history has been incredibly shallow and superficial. Countless times have I heard in the papers that the Smithsons were 'disciples of Le Corbusier', rather than the iconoclasts who destroyed the CIAM and ridiculed Corb's anti-street prejudices. Similarly, I read one commentator quoting the great critic Iain Nairn, on the 'softly spoken it's-good-for-you castration of the East End' to attack the buildings. That Nairn was a supporter both of the Smithsons' work and of the now demolished or mutilated Brutalism of Rodney Gordon is apparently irrelevant, as is the fact that RHG was pitched in opposition to the system-built blandness that Nairn was denouncing. And finally, can we be done with the canard that this is all for the benefit of the residents? Some seem to think that the choice is between Robin Hood Gardens or some sort of joyous return of the back-to-backs.
As Entschwindet's reading of the Blackwall Reach Regeneration 'Consultation' made very clear, the tenants of Robin Hood Gardens will most likely be shunted off to Barking or the Thames Gateway in favour of the legal percentage of 'affordable' home-owners and a whole crew of bankers, with the site of this flawed, but brilliant scheme becoming another casualty to the endless expansion of the City of London. Funnily enough, it's now the perfect weather to see RHG. The concrete aggregate, which is different for each layer of the building - glinting and hard at the front, softer as you get towards the individual flats - catches the sun, and looks golden. A few yards away is a wall of towering 'luxury' flats, utterly lacking in the public space and greenery the Smithsons thought so essential to inner-urban life, clad in tacked on ticky-tacky bits of pine and plastic, containing flats far smaller than those of RHG - recapitulating the worst mistakes of 60s system building, while a genuinely unique and sensitive example has been abandoned and left to rot for thirty years to the point where its residents would vote for its demolition. It's flats like the delightful examples I've posted here that will, it's now almost certain, replace it. They're shiny, they look vaguely executive. Unlike RHG, where the intricacies of the design and planning don't provide an instant antiseptic hit, it takes no effort to appraise the Stunning Developments. While one just elicits the Pavlovian reaction 'concrete, ugh', the other signifies what we all, apparently aspire to. And as yet another example of perhaps the only serious British contribution to 20th century architecture faces demolition, is there any other art form about which we could be so utterly, wilfully philistine? Entartete Architektur, anyone?
Even when they're not living in blocks of flats, much-reviled architects from Basil Spence to the Smithsons have designed entirely Modernist houses for themselves to live in. Meanwhile, before the War, Modernism in Britain was an almost 100% middle class movement - by, and for the progressive bourgeoisie. No-one other than the most silly of architectural traditionalists seriously argues that Highpoint or Embassy Court were barbaric barracks - they were well-appointed, intelligently planned housing that just happened to be designed by people who didn't believe that the 19th century represented the pinnacle of human achievement. When the designers of interwar flats for intellectuals started designing flats for workers they usually tried to maintain exactly the same standards. The idea that the profession all live in swanky Victorian houses in Chelsea (that's just Richard Rogers) while designing concrete monstrosities to impose their socialistic fantasies on the proletariat is a bizarre myth that needs to put to rest.
Also, the quoting of authorities or the invocation of history has been incredibly shallow and superficial. Countless times have I heard in the papers that the Smithsons were 'disciples of Le Corbusier', rather than the iconoclasts who destroyed the CIAM and ridiculed Corb's anti-street prejudices. Similarly, I read one commentator quoting the great critic Iain Nairn, on the 'softly spoken it's-good-for-you castration of the East End' to attack the buildings. That Nairn was a supporter both of the Smithsons' work and of the now demolished or mutilated Brutalism of Rodney Gordon is apparently irrelevant, as is the fact that RHG was pitched in opposition to the system-built blandness that Nairn was denouncing. And finally, can we be done with the canard that this is all for the benefit of the residents? Some seem to think that the choice is between Robin Hood Gardens or some sort of joyous return of the back-to-backs.
As Entschwindet's reading of the Blackwall Reach Regeneration 'Consultation' made very clear, the tenants of Robin Hood Gardens will most likely be shunted off to Barking or the Thames Gateway in favour of the legal percentage of 'affordable' home-owners and a whole crew of bankers, with the site of this flawed, but brilliant scheme becoming another casualty to the endless expansion of the City of London. Funnily enough, it's now the perfect weather to see RHG. The concrete aggregate, which is different for each layer of the building - glinting and hard at the front, softer as you get towards the individual flats - catches the sun, and looks golden. A few yards away is a wall of towering 'luxury' flats, utterly lacking in the public space and greenery the Smithsons thought so essential to inner-urban life, clad in tacked on ticky-tacky bits of pine and plastic, containing flats far smaller than those of RHG - recapitulating the worst mistakes of 60s system building, while a genuinely unique and sensitive example has been abandoned and left to rot for thirty years to the point where its residents would vote for its demolition. It's flats like the delightful examples I've posted here that will, it's now almost certain, replace it. They're shiny, they look vaguely executive. Unlike RHG, where the intricacies of the design and planning don't provide an instant antiseptic hit, it takes no effort to appraise the Stunning Developments. While one just elicits the Pavlovian reaction 'concrete, ugh', the other signifies what we all, apparently aspire to. And as yet another example of perhaps the only serious British contribution to 20th century architecture faces demolition, is there any other art form about which we could be so utterly, wilfully philistine? Entartete Architektur, anyone?
posted by owen hatherley at 11:00 am
8 Comments:
A pedant writes...
Ian Nairn's comment (in the introduction to the East End and East London chapter of Nairn's London) was written before both RHG and most of the "system-built" horrors.
After the castration quote, he continued... "all the raucous, homely places go and are replaced by well-designed estates which would fit a new town but are hopelessly out of place here."
Of the new council housing that was extant in 1966, he said of Lasdun's Usk Street:
"A lot of talk about the vertical recreation of the East End Street but not much performance in fact. ... If you want to like Modern Architecture, don't come to the East End"
I'm afraid I think that pretty much sums up RHG as well.
Maybe, pedant, maybe. But it's kind of irrelevant now - the old East End is not in Poplar, the blocks are 85% Bengali (and was pretty raucous, though not always for the right reasons). Whether the old communities are still there is by the by - they're not really anywhere in the East End.
I don't know Nairn's opinion on RHG itself (would definitely be interested to know), but he was certainly sympathetic to Brutalism, which the writer in question (in the Times, I think it was?) certainly overlooked in favour of the tedious dichotomy of naive Corbusians and noble slums. But what Nairn was talking about in '66 was I assume the bland, Harlow-ish stuff like the estate at the bottom end of Cambridge Heath Road, which has as little to do with RHG as does the system-built stuff.
(Apparently the 'community' in Lasdun's Claredale Street Cluster block was cited by residents when opposing demolition (which of course was replaced by gentrification in that instance). Obviously there's no such resistance in RHG, for all sorts of reasons, I would imagine - the fact that Lasdun's buildings are tied into the area much better than RHG (the one thing I will definitely agree with the anti crowd over is that it has an absolutely appalling site, which I would challenge any architect to make something decent of), maybe linguistic reasons too - it's very unusual for council tenants to vote for their buildings to be demolished, and I'd love to know the turnout for the vote in the 'consultation').
Absolutely bang on, as usual. Richard Rogers, with his Georgian house (actually totally modern open-plan interior, from what I can remember), seems to symbolise the myth that architects don't live in the same type of architecture that they inflict on others.
Regarding RHG, as well as the "why don't they go and live in it", there's also the inane rhetoric of SImon Jenkins who thinks that that architects who defend RHG should "put their money where their mouth is", and buy the estate:
"Robin Hood's defenders include the richest architects and developers in the land. If they want their icon, let them have it. They should be granted three months to go down to Poplar, put in an offer for the estate, persuade its residents of the beauty of their environment and agree to restore it. Let money follow where mouths so boldly go."
The debate over RHG definitely seems to have attracted a fair share of wingnuts. Finally, I offer this article from the Spectator.
Correction: as Stephen Bayley writes in The Guardian, Rogers' own house in Chelsea was two Victorian houses, behind which Rogers totally remodelled the interior.
Finally, I offer this article from the Spectator.
Christ. If only architecture was run by 'left-wing ideologues'...
The first time I saw RHG, it was winter. It frowned - admittedly rather seductively, but it was not a happy place to be.
A couple of weekends ago, bathed in sunshine, it looked glorious - a wonderful (if unkempt) open space surrounded by two formidable, humanely designed buildings. That these buldings were poorly constructed, unfortunately situated (right next to the tunnel) and victims of a segregationalist lettings policy does not invalidate the building itself.
I think the decision to demolish is very sad - and not for any sentimental reasons, as I've explained on my blog.
A word on what will inevitably replace them. If architecture tells us something about contemporary ideology, it's not surprising that EVERY housing development during the last decade (c'mon, prove me wrong) has looked like an office block.
Owen, to paraphrase something you wrote on work recently, this crap is the architectural form of CBT for the underclasses. A shiny happy building will create shiny happy (productive) people.
To give FAT their due, their stuff doesn't look like office blocks. Mind you, I wouldn't mind if these things looked like good office blocks. Me, I'd happily live in Seifert's Space House, Centrosoyuz, etc. The Stunning Developments try to de-bureaucratise themselves with all that insufferable wood detailing. In the outrageously unlikely event that I obtain some dirigiste power over architecture and its aesthetics then one of my first decrees (after land nationalisation, obv) would be a total ban on stuck-on facades, and those insufferable fucking 'irregular' windows - the pretension of 'humanity' and 'warmth' of these sub-Parker Morris bankers' hutches is much of what makes them so evil.
Incidentally, check the c20th society's statement on the rejection of listing - there has been some major skullduggery at English Heritage, it would seem, with advisers like Gavin Stamp and Bridget Cherry who might have voted for listing barred from involvement in the decision, etc. It's very clear this was a politically motivated decision. Good news for the City (who have been having such a bad time lately, poor things) and good also for unpopular politicians chancing their arm at a bit of populism. Sad indeed.
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