— the nice modernist

(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.)