Rethinking Post-War Design
From The New York Times
March 19, 2009 Architecture
Rethinking Postwar Design in London
LONDON – The most polarizing issue in architecture today is no longer whether celebrity architects are ruining the profession. It’s what to do with the leftovers of postwar Brutalism.
For an older generation of architects these buildings embody the absolute nadir of the welfare state. Destroying them would be an act of mercy. But for younger architects the aggressive concrete forms that gave the movement its name are a welcome antidote to the saccharine Disney-inspired structures of today. Their demolition amounts to urban shock treatment, an erasure of historical memory that substitutes a sanitized city for a genuinely complex one.
Central to the debate is the future of Robin Hood Gardens, a sprawling East London housing complex designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1960s and built in the early ’70s. Preservationists hold it up as a signal cultural achievement; the British government has judged it a failure and wants to demolish it. As is so often the case, insights emerge from the sparks that fly when two opposing ideologies clash.
Just traveling to the complex can be an unwelcome lesson in failed urban policy. On my trip the Docklands Light Railway train from central London broke down, requiring me to board a garbage-strewn school bus and then two trains to reach my destination. The long walk from the station was even worse: a retrospective of failed public-housing design through the decades.
By the time I got there my enthusiasm had dwindled. My first view of Robin Hood Gardens was from across a busy roadway. The complex is surrounded by a ring of forbidding concrete walls tilted outward to block out noise. Just beyond this ring, ramps lead to underground parking, forming a kind of moat between the buildings and the street. The facades are in decrepit shape. Even on a rare sunny London day the project’s famous concrete walkways, which the Smithsons called “streets in the air,” look gray and melancholy. The rows of concrete mullions, a play on Mies van der Rohe’s steel I-beams, give the facade the aura of a medieval fortification.
Inside, tenants of Robin Hood Gardens ride claustrophobic elevators to reach their apartments. When the elevators break down, they climb a dank, airless stairwell. A barrier that runs up the center of the staircase makes it impossible to see what’s around the corner, so you worry that you are about to get mugged each time you reach a landing. The experience only reinforces the isolation of the mostly poor immigrants who live here.
Still, you do not have to be a hard-core Modernist to notice a higher form of architectural intelligence at work here. All you need is to suspend your aesthetic prejudices. The tough exterior, as it turns out, protects an inner sanctuary: a large courtyard centered on a big mound of grass. And the mound itself is a gorgeous, haunted space. It evokes both a primitive burial mound and traditional Georgian gardens.
The buildings framing it on either side are slightly bent, as if the space was being held between two cupped hands. One is several stories lower than the other to allow in southern light.
There are also wonderful details to be found above if you know to look for them. The walkways’ rails are fitted with glass panels to allow more light into the apartments. Doors are set perpendicular to the walkways to provide an element of privacy. The duplex apartments themselves are laid out according to a complex system developed by the Russian Constructivist Moisei Ginzburg and popularized by Le Corbusier, with entries set on alternate levels so that each apartment has an entire floor with windows on both sides.
Elements like these may not justify a meticulous restoration, but they certainly suggest that they can be transformed into humane, even exhilarating, housing without completely stripping them of their soul.
The obvious starting point would be to redesign the entry blocks at the end of each building, creating bigger, airier spaces. Apartments could also be opened up by knocking down interior walls and putting in bigger windows.
But a more meaningful approach would be to allow an imaginative architect to tackle the entire complex. Introducing a tension between new and old is only likely to make the Smithsons’ design more poignant.
The advantage to this strategy is partly environmental. Construction is one of the largest single producers of carbon dioxide. In the age of global warming, deciding to tear down and rebuild rather than think through whether a project can be salvaged has obvious ethical implications.
Yet an equally important issue is how we treat the cities we inherit and the memories they hold. Condemning an entire historical movement can be a symptom of intellectual laziness. It can also be a way to avoid difficult truths.
Architecture attains much of its power from the emotional exchanges among an architect, a client, a site and the object itself. A spirited renovation of Robin Hood Gardens would be a chance to extend that discourse across generations.
Copyright (c) 2009 The New York Times – emphasis added