Robin Hood Gardens is demolished now, making way for high-rise towers, and 5 times the amount of housing. Half of that will be ‘affordable,’ but not in a traditional social housing sense.
Robin Hood Gardens’ promise was once so great that it featured as an architectural exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale of 1976. It was presented as a monument to the study of social interaction, and how architectural design could make that happen.
Fragments of demolished Robin Hood Gardens are now slated to be exhibited at the 2018 Venice Biennale, to trigger a discussion about what went wrong with the project, and how that speaks to our current affordable housing crisis.
Was Robin Hood Gardens doomed, as all architecture may be, to outlast the artistic tastes of an era, destined to be scrapped before its useful life? Certainly this has been a reason advanced in the UK to demolish social housing built in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Try: Brutalism: The Demise Of The High Rise Live-in Parking Garage?
Perhaps it was it ‘too good’ for its tenants, a purse of pearls offered up to swine who destroyed the buildings through careless indifference or hostility? If so, its tenants were lucky to escape the uniformly shoddy makeover of social housing towers, leading to the deaths in the Grenfell Tower fire. Try: Portland Economy Wolves Huff And Puff At Mayor’s Affordable House Of Sticks
Or is the answer more simple: a resource squandered and gradually ground into the dirt before the end of its useful lifetime by its local authority owner, Tower Hamlets, which never adequately maintained the housing?
Read more in Frieze: What Installing a Demolished London Estate in Venice Says About Our Housing Crisis
