Brutalism - Aesthetics - Politics
AA talk with Nicholas Thoburn

Amsterdam Alternative will talk to Nick about his new book Brutalism as Found: Housing, Form and Crisis at Robin Hood Gardens. In the book, Nick uses the demolition of the (in)famous Brutalist housing estate in East London as lens through which to analyse the current wave of urban regeneration. What can we learn today from the Brutalist movement in architecture that combined bold aesthetics with political vision and social ambition at a time when the accounting spreadsheets of international investors increasingly determine the future of our cities? How can the memory of a housing project such as Robin Hood Gardens inform and inspire our struggle for a more democratic and inclusive Amsterdam?
Friday, June 7th, 19.00 hrs, Ventilator cinema/bar // OT301

Brutalism “as found” at Robin Hood Gardens
Nicholas Thoburn

Robin Hood Gardens, the east London council estate designed by Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson, sat on the fault-line of class and inequality that courses through the city. More than a cleavage between rich and poor, this fault-line is a destructive force of redevelopment that bore down on the estate and culminated in its demolition. Cleared for a £600 million redevelopment named Blackwall Reach, demolition commenced in 2017 with one of the estate’s paired buildings, the other awaiting the same fate. But the fault-line had long been visible, on the one hand, in the estate’s physical disrepair, readied for demolition by local-authority neglect and disinvestment, and, on the other, in the logo-topped towers of the international banks at Canary Wharf, looming ominously on the estate’s near horizon.

These gleaming towers sited on London’s former docks are both instance and icon of the “revanchist city,” to invoke geographer Neil Smith’s term for the renewed and vengeful calibration of the urban terrain to profit, rent, and speculation – the city remade by and for global finance. It is a social assault with a pronounced aesthetic dimension. Social, because the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens is one instance of the increasing ejection of working-class populations from inner London, and from housing affordability, security, and safety, a process that goes by the dissimulating term “regeneration.” Aesthetic, because this social assault is commonly cloaked and lent motive force in its repackaging by government and media as a liberating “blitz” on the “concrete monstrosities” of Brutalist and other post-war council estates, of which Robin Hood Gardens has routinely figured as a preeminent example.

The aesthetics of demolition are nothing if not complex, however. The moment the stigmatizing symbolism of the concrete monstrosity had fulfilled its promise in the destruction of Robin Hood Gardens, it was joined by an apparently opposing aesthetic evaluation, when London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) stepped in to salvage a three-story section of the estate. Destined for installation in the culture-industries quarter of another London regeneration, part of the V&A’s acquisition was first exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Here a curious transformation took place. What had long been maligned and condemned when it served as working-class housing, was in Venice championed as a “small segment of a masterpiece,” now that it provided middle-class cultural consumption in the circuit of global art and culture.

Such are the social and aesthetic forces that have taken hold of Robin Hood Gardens in recent years. They also illustrate the public prominence of the estate. Since 2007 and the first of two high-profile campaigns to save it from demolition, Robin Hood Gardens has been the subject of colloquia, design competitions, artists’ projects, documentary films, television features, a stage play, photography exhibitions, folk songs and a vinyl record, journalism, academic articles, books, and now the V&A work of salvage. Some of these have been more critically adequate to their object than others, and valuable for that. But Ang Li, in an essay about the campaigns to save it, is right I think that Robin Hood Gardens has become something of a “concrete marionette,” a malleable symbol for shifting representations, opinions, and political stakes, in which “the architecture is silenced into mere iconography.”

I make this observation, I hasten to add, not because we should cut through representation and politics to rediscover an architectural object cleansed of incrustation. Representation and politics are integral to architecture and prominent in my understanding of this estate. Rather, the claim I make for my book, Brutalism as Found – and for the exhibition of Kois Miah’s photographs of the estate’s residents with which I collaborated – is that they recentre Robin Hood Gardens in its own story and in our time. This is not to integrate the estate or plot it in narrative, but to be immersed in it, to grasp it in its architectural and social complexity and originality, to encounter it as it confronts and provokes us in the crisis conditions of today. It is to be immersed in the estate’s architectural forms, materials, atmospheres, images, concepts, and myths, in its residents’ experiences, in its demolition and afterlife, as it courses with the conflictual conditions of the present. In turn, it is to follow how Robin Hood Gardens intervenes in these conditions, where its social and architectural forms interrogate and challenge today’s Brutalist revival and the politics and aesthetics of social housing in its present crisis.

This is what it means to encounter Robin Hood Gardens “as found.” The as found, one of many neologisms coined by Alison and Peter Smithson in the course of their practice, is a Brutalist sensibility, even a method. Against the imposition of predetermined built form, it names an immersive relation to materials, sites, and social conditions, where their flux and crises are brought to light as integral to architectural expression. An architecture – and a criticism – that is as found is flush with the world, and all the more awkward, unfinished, experimental, and critical for it.

Excerpted from Nicholas Thoburn’s book, Brutalism as Found: Housing: Form and Crisis at Robin Hood Gardens, London: Goldsmiths Press, 2022