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?