Where do we begin, the Rubble or Our Sins? The Collapse of Robin Hood Gardens

So this week, as London is completely shut-down in the holidays, I decided to take a visit out to the soon to be demolished Robin Hood Gardens by the Smithsons.* Now, I actually don't live too far from the complex, (only about a 10 minute walk north) but hadn't been because, as my cockney love so elegantly put it: "Don't go down there, some of those people are right scally." But in a great continuation of earlier themes in ignoring good advice, I went anyway.

And what did I think?

I liked it a lot, that is, I liked it a lot architecturally. In another age, and with significantly more money, it might have been like the Royal Crescent in Bath. Looking at the space, it's balanced with the landscape and the details are well crafted by designers who clearly cared about what they were putting together. In the past year, I've developed a growing fondness for Brutalism, not as a factor, but as a design style with vision and specific intent. If I would summarize the space in a word it would be: Honesty.

But then again, I'm an architect and as such see the design, but not what it means.

Now that I live in the far East End, as opposed the "fashionable" East End I lived in previously (which I can no longer afford because, as it turns out, Grad School student loans are expensive) social housing, as a typology, makes sense. You've got a lot of people with kids, a lot of people looking for work, and a lot of immigrants (including myself) who need help getting a foot in the door. What doesn't make sense, though, is asking people to walk across a massive complex just to get to public transport, dark corners, visual inaccessibility and most importantly, having a big-ass depressing highway right next to a massive housing complex. It is too big to live in.

Looking at Robin Hood Gardens made me realize that as much as architecture wants to be a balm for social issues, a lot designs of social agendas are kind of dickish.

The word I'll use here which I am loathe to use is "Community". I hate the word "community" in design because it's often just a flowery hipster way of saying "the natives", that is, poor people. It's an upper middle class way of classifying anything other than an organic farmers market and craft fair is somehow not enough. In a way, current social housing developments are at their most obnoxious when schemes are phrased as "fostering community" as if community was an orphan, lost in a system. What these kinds of statements imply is that there isn't a group of people who have a way of relating to each other already.

They do. They live in the same part of town. Is it always a shining beacon of connection and tolerance? No. God No. But assuming that some walls and windows are going to fix something like three generations of not having enough money is silly.

The Smithsons themselves had similar feelings about their work by the 1990s. Basically saying the problem with Robin Hood Gardens was not the architecture, it was the people in it. When I first heard these statements, I was shocked, I mean the basic understanding of contemporary architecture is that can make people better. But what makes people better is so far beyond architecture it's almost scary. For example, right now in Poplar, the private housing industry is moving in with full force. Kicking people out of the Goldfinger's Balfron Tower and building complexes for Canary Wharf finance workers at indestructible speed.

What really helps people is giving them skills as children, jobs as adults and not telling them that's not enough. Architecture can't really do this, it only provides the setting. It doesn't mean the settings shouldn't try to be sustainable, accessible and, well, beautiful but asking architects to solve all the problems with their trade isn't possible. Though, asking architects not to be idealistic is like asking a fish not to swim. It's just the profession.

I think that's why social design is so fascinating, it's a rock and a hard place of intent and outcome. I guess, architects, keep trying. And yet, no Architects are not Mother Theresa, you're just a person with an idea to change the setting of a hard life for people in a city that doesn't want them anymore.

Long Story Short: Someone in 15 years is going to write a thesis about how Robin Hood Gardens was an amazing bit of architecture and will never have consulted anyone who actually lived there. Calling it now.

*I have to apologize for not having my own pictures, my camera decided it was going to die this week. But when I get it fixed I'll be sure to put more up.