Honour to the Woods Unshorn
(Robin Hood Gardens. Photo by Flickr user joseph_beuys_hat.)
While Paris ponders it’s future, London is examining it’s past, seeking the destruction of a brutalist modern housing complex, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1960s.
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 façade 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. [Nicolai Ouroussoff/New York Times]
Complaints of escalating crime and neglect have placed this particular development on watch as living conditions degrade. An easy solution is to blame the building—to uproot the community and replace and renew. These solutions overlook the root cause in favour of the quick-fix, leaving in place the existing problems overlaid on a newer, shinier infrastructure—or the systematic displacement of the existing community via the process of gentrification.
Jane Jacobs describes the urban renewal of Manhattan in the 1950s:
Well what was getting immediately under my skin was this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal. And the way it had been adopted like a fad and people were so mindless about it and so dishonest about what was being done. That’s what ticked me off, because I was working for an architectural magazine and I saw all this first hand and I saw how the most awful things were being excused. […]
They could justify it because urban renewal was a greater good, so they would bare false witness for this greater good. Why was this a greater good? Everybody knew it because slums are bad. But this isn’t a slum. Oh well. You know, the whole thing. They didn’t care how things worked anymore. That was part of it. That was part of what was making me so angry. Also they didn’t seem to care what part truth and untruths had in these things. That’s part of how things work. And do you care about it. [Jane Jacobs, interviewed by Jim Kunstler, Metropolis Magazine 03/2001]
The systematic erasure of Modernism in favour of the style du jour, the process of which fosters the creation of a new community of diaspora, is far from the most correct solution to the problems of Robin Hood Gardens. I beg you remember the countless examples worldwide where modernism thrives, and draw your own conclusions.
(Simon Fraser University. Photo by Flickr user devlyn.)