the latest mind map showing link between quotes in the texts
Monday, 8 December 2008
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
How I learnt to love the streets in the sky
Some children are brought up to love cats and hate dogs, others to adore Manchester United and despise Liverpool. I was brought up to revere Victorian architecture and to abhor modern buildings. Modern buildings, whatever their vintage, whatever their supposed virtues, were rubbish and that was that. In the 1980s, an 'executive' estate was built on the field opposite our Sheffield home. For my parents, midway through restoring their black-leaded fireplaces, the arrival of these buildings involved a certain amount of trauma, an anxiety that transmitted itself to me.
Our terrace was built of local sandstone and, darkened by age and industry, its exterior always reminded me of burnt toast. These houses, though, were built of brick so bright it made my eyes ache and they had gleaming tarmac drives which looked, even in dry weather, like licks of liquorice. At night, I lay in bed and indulged in violent fantasies in which I went Awol with a wrecking ball.
In Sheffield, haters of modern architecture had a perfect focus for their loathing in the form of Park Hill, the council estate that is now the biggest listed building in Britain. As a teenager, I hated Park Hill even more than I loathed Mrs Thatcher, for the simple reason that it made people think badly of my city. It wasn't just that no one liked so-called Brutalism. By the mid-1980s, the flats, then nearly 30 years old, were in a sorry state: dilapidated, and reputedly crammed with the council's most difficult tenants. Yet no visitor could escape them. The estate sits high on a cliff, overlooking the railway station, dominating the landscape like some great prison (a friend of a friend was once told by a taxi driver that Park Hill had been built, not in the late 1950s, but in the 1930s and that had Hitler invaded Britain, it would have been the site of his HQ).
When I went to university and told people where I was from, they would wrinkle their noses and say: 'Oh, I went through there once on the train...' and you just knew that they were picturing Park Hill. It was embarrassing. Why couldn't the council knock the thing down and start again?
Strange, then, that all these years later Park Hill is not only one of the buildings that I like most in the world, but the cause of an unexpected passion on my part for 20th-century buildings in general and 1960s buildings in particular (though I still hate executive estates and always will). This is not to say that I love every bit of concrete I see. The more I learn, the more I realise that postwar architecture is like any other kind of architecture: some is good, some bad.
Recently, I visited Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London, a scheme with which Park Hill is often compared, and a recent Brutalist cause celebre (in July, to much gnashing of teeth from architecture nerds, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, advised by English Heritage, ruled that the estate, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, would not be listed, though the Twentieth Century Society has since been successful in its request for a legal review of this decision).
Thanks to my new fondness for grey slabs, I expected, if not to love it, then to want to save it; this is the only housing scheme that the radical Smithsons ever managed to get built. But the DCMS was right. Robin Hood Gardens is neither generous, nor well-built, and its site has changed beyond all recognition in the last 30 years, its old dockyard views gone, its 'gardens' polluted by the relentless grind of traffic into the Blackwall Tunnel. It is beyond saving, as its fans would find out if they ran a competition among developers for its renovation (there isn't a company in the land that would want that gig).
But Park Hill is not Robin Hood Gardens. Once a great and innovative building, it one day will be again. In the last year, Sheffield City Council's ambitious plan to give the estate a second life as a hip home for urban professionals has at last got under way: tenants have moved out and Urban Splash, the development company, has moved in. When I first heard about this project, I assumed that these residents, worn down by living in a building so down at heel, would be glad to escape, that they'd say to the incoming yuppies: 'You're welcome to it' and score themselves a nice new house.
I was wrong. More than 200 have put down their names for the share of Park Hill that will eventually be owned by Manchester Methodist Housing Association (determined that the site be socially mixed, the council has decreed that a third of the 900 new flats will be 'affordable' and two-thirds of those will be for social rent). Some are living elsewhere and hope to return. A hard core, however, remains on site even as the dust rises around them. This lot love Park Hill and don't like the idea of living anywhere else.
Cut to last April, when all this started. Until now, I've never been inside Park Hill. Once I'm standing in the middle of it, though, two things strike me. The first is the sense of drama that builds as you walk through its courtyards, which get grander the higher the flats grow (built on a hill, the lowest tower sits on the site's highest point and vice versa); their embrace makes me think not of A Clockwork Orange but of the Colosseum in Rome. The second is the fact that Park Hill, unlike Robin Hood Gardens and its listed neighbour, Ernö Goldfinger's Balfron Tower, is not built of concrete. Its frame is concrete but its curtain walls are made of red, orange and yellow brick. Thanks to the damage wrought by heavy pollution, this is not something you can tell from the street.
Beside me, in the whipping cold, Grenville Squires, a caretaker who has worked here for 26 years - until recently, he lived here, too - is hopping with excitement. He loves tourists. 'The way it all fits together,' he says. 'It's like a jigsaw puzzle. I look at it as a feat of engineering. It was so clever. It had a district heating system - the only place with one like it was in Norway, where they'd capped a geyser - and a communal waste disposal system [this survived until the advent of disposable nappies]. When the new developers did a concrete survey, they found that it is not yet a third of the way through its life.'
We get in Grenville's electric cart, and he drives me along Park Hill's interconnected decks to prove that the now much derided 'streets in the sky' really were wide enough to take a milk float. When we get to a suitable vantage point, he attempts to describe the estate as it was. 'There were four pubs, a supermarket, a hardware shop, a butcher's, a ladies' shoe shop, a chip shop. It was like a medieval village; you didn't have to leave.'
So he doesn't believe that it was Park Hill's architects, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, who are to blame for what eventually became of the estate? That their design was too brutal, too idealistic, too rigidly controlling?
'No, it was the council's fault. They gave anyone who wanted one a flat and they didn't work hard enough at maintenance. She's lovely [the building]. She's my mistress, the only lady who's fetched me from the marital bed at two in the morning and made demands. She has come on hard times, but all she's got to do is wash her face and put on a new dress and she will be fine.'
At the Park Hill social club, I meet the hard core who remain in residence; they are of the same opinion. Brenda Hague was 22 when she moved into Park Hill on 7 December 1959. Was she full of foreboding as she took possession of her neat new flat with its covetable kitchen, a reconstruction of which I have just seen in Sheffield's Weston Park Museum? Not at all. 'It was luxury,' she says. 'Me, my husband and our baby were living in a back-to-back. My parents were there, too, and my brother. We had no bathroom, just a tin bath on the back of the door. So when we got here it was marvellous. Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It's lovely, especially at night, when it's all lit up.'
In those days, Park Hill was a quiet place, most of its tenants young families. But even when it began to be run down, in the 1980s, her fondness endured. 'It always felt safe to me. They say it looks horrible. Maybe it does from the outside. It's what's inside that counts. My son lives in Harrogate now and he has nothing but fond memories.'
How does she feel about the refurbishment? Pleased, so long as she can remain where she's always been. I ask her friend Edith Bradbury, another resident of almost half a century, if it's hard to imagine a new Park Hill, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of its previous incarnation. 'It is. But it was hard to imagine it when it first went up. All the little streets this replaced. Who'd have thought it?'
'Will it work? Will it be a success?' 'Yes. I think it is going to be lovely.'
Park Hill tells the story of a century. The streets it replaced were home to some of the worst slums in Europe, people living 400 to the acre in houses so tightly packed they barely saw the sun, their only access to water a standpipe in the yard. But they had work. The valley that Park Hill lords it over was home to steel mills, mines and the workshops of the Little Mesters, the craftsmen who made the finest cutlery in the world. Park Hill's fortunes faded as this industry evaporated into thin air; between 1979 and 1989, 53,000 jobs were lost in a city of 200,000.
What interests me, though, is what the estate tells us about our relationship with modern buildings. These days, a single structure can come to represent a world view, standing proxy for our aesthetics and our politics. I used to hate it and now I like it. Perhaps you think this tells you a lot about me, but it doesn't really. Or it shouldn't. Park Hill is only one building. This is why we should treat with caution the arguments of commentators like Simon Jenkins, the new chairman of the National Trust, who deride all Brutalist buildings, the 'ideologues' who created them and the intellectuals and theorists who praise them while choosing to live in Georgian terraces.
Brenda Hague is no theorist, nor is Ivor Smith an ideologue. 'When Reyner Banham [the architecture critic] called us Brutalists, we didn't know what it meant,' says Smith. 'We didn't think we were Brutalists. We thought we were quite nice guys.'
When work began on Park Hill in 1957, he and Lynn were young, newly qualified, full of youthful enthusiasm and inspired by the optimism abroad in postwar Britain, however austere. 'The Unité [by le Corbusier, in Marseille] had just been built and it was exciting. But it wasn't an infatuation. We'd also made drawings of John Wood's crescents in Bath.'
Returning to Park Hill after 35 years, he thought it looked 'marvellous' from the town. Was there anything he would have done differently? 'The decks. A street has windows at street level. But at Park Hill, conditioned by best value for money, we couldn't have windows on to the pavements.' Does he like Urban Splash's ideas? 'Yes, though if anything I think they could be more daring.'
What of those ideas? The company has produced a flash brochure to showcase its £130m refurbishment of Park Hill and it makes for cheering, if occasionally comic, reading. To the naysayers, it points out that the density of the site - 192 people per acre - is well in excess of what the government considers to be a sustainable community and that the flats' original plans are more generous than the boxes favoured by modern developers. So, Park Hill is a 'bruiser'.
The company will give it 'romance': oak trees, allotments, a wildflower meadow, crown green bowls, a dance studio, a high street ('a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker'). The marketeers write of wanting to build a 'yellow brick road' leading to a city sweet shop, Granelli's Spice ('spice' is a Sheffield word for sweets and Bertie Bassett one of its most famous sons). Cutest of all, the company will retain the graffiti that adorns Park Hill 13 storeys up and which once had a starring role in an Arctic Monkeys video: 'I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME'.
But none of this would be happening at all were it not for the building itself. English Heritage's controversial decision to confer Grade II* listed status on Park Hill in 1998, for its contribution to British Modernism, now seems prescient and wise. It surely would have been demolished otherwise and lots of identical, red-brick boxes stuck in its place. Of course, refurbishments of modernist buildings are extremely challenging and not all successful. In Islington, residents of Lubetkin's Spa Green Estate are taking legal action over the recent refurbishment of their homes, claiming the work was 'poor at best, and damaging at worst'.
But for the time being, the sense of hope and expectation at Park Hill is palpable. After my visit, I catch the bus home to our toasty old terrace and, over supper, I ask my mother, ever so politely, if she has thought about where she will live in her retirement.
Good, bad, ugly? Modernist landmarks
Royal College of Physicians, Regent's Park, London, by Denys Lasdun (1964)Most people know Lasdun for the Royal National Theatre, but this is miles better; its elegant sensibility seems to owe more to Frank Lloyd Wright thanle Corbusier.
Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk, by Alison and Peter Smithson (1949-1954)The building that made them famous: a steel frame with brick and glass panels, and a water tank high on a tower, it's a small-scale homage to Mies van der Rohe.
2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London, by Ernö Goldfinger (1938)Goldfinger is best known for his immense Brutalist tower blocks, Trellick Tower in North Kensington, and Balfron Tower in Poplar. Willow Road, his home, is more gentle and notable for its clever use of space and a spiral staircase designed by Ove Arup.
Trinity Square car park, Gateshead, by Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon (1969)Also known as the Get Carter car park, after the 1971 film in which it appears. See it now: its demolition is imminent. Gordon also designed the unpopular Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth - demolished in 2004 - and the Michael Faraday Memorial at Elephant and Castle in south London.
Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee, by Victor Pasmore (1963-1970)Controversial piece of abstract public art in the Sunny Blunts housing estate. A grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund has recently
Our terrace was built of local sandstone and, darkened by age and industry, its exterior always reminded me of burnt toast. These houses, though, were built of brick so bright it made my eyes ache and they had gleaming tarmac drives which looked, even in dry weather, like licks of liquorice. At night, I lay in bed and indulged in violent fantasies in which I went Awol with a wrecking ball.
In Sheffield, haters of modern architecture had a perfect focus for their loathing in the form of Park Hill, the council estate that is now the biggest listed building in Britain. As a teenager, I hated Park Hill even more than I loathed Mrs Thatcher, for the simple reason that it made people think badly of my city. It wasn't just that no one liked so-called Brutalism. By the mid-1980s, the flats, then nearly 30 years old, were in a sorry state: dilapidated, and reputedly crammed with the council's most difficult tenants. Yet no visitor could escape them. The estate sits high on a cliff, overlooking the railway station, dominating the landscape like some great prison (a friend of a friend was once told by a taxi driver that Park Hill had been built, not in the late 1950s, but in the 1930s and that had Hitler invaded Britain, it would have been the site of his HQ).
When I went to university and told people where I was from, they would wrinkle their noses and say: 'Oh, I went through there once on the train...' and you just knew that they were picturing Park Hill. It was embarrassing. Why couldn't the council knock the thing down and start again?
Strange, then, that all these years later Park Hill is not only one of the buildings that I like most in the world, but the cause of an unexpected passion on my part for 20th-century buildings in general and 1960s buildings in particular (though I still hate executive estates and always will). This is not to say that I love every bit of concrete I see. The more I learn, the more I realise that postwar architecture is like any other kind of architecture: some is good, some bad.
Recently, I visited Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London, a scheme with which Park Hill is often compared, and a recent Brutalist cause celebre (in July, to much gnashing of teeth from architecture nerds, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, advised by English Heritage, ruled that the estate, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, would not be listed, though the Twentieth Century Society has since been successful in its request for a legal review of this decision).
Thanks to my new fondness for grey slabs, I expected, if not to love it, then to want to save it; this is the only housing scheme that the radical Smithsons ever managed to get built. But the DCMS was right. Robin Hood Gardens is neither generous, nor well-built, and its site has changed beyond all recognition in the last 30 years, its old dockyard views gone, its 'gardens' polluted by the relentless grind of traffic into the Blackwall Tunnel. It is beyond saving, as its fans would find out if they ran a competition among developers for its renovation (there isn't a company in the land that would want that gig).
But Park Hill is not Robin Hood Gardens. Once a great and innovative building, it one day will be again. In the last year, Sheffield City Council's ambitious plan to give the estate a second life as a hip home for urban professionals has at last got under way: tenants have moved out and Urban Splash, the development company, has moved in. When I first heard about this project, I assumed that these residents, worn down by living in a building so down at heel, would be glad to escape, that they'd say to the incoming yuppies: 'You're welcome to it' and score themselves a nice new house.
I was wrong. More than 200 have put down their names for the share of Park Hill that will eventually be owned by Manchester Methodist Housing Association (determined that the site be socially mixed, the council has decreed that a third of the 900 new flats will be 'affordable' and two-thirds of those will be for social rent). Some are living elsewhere and hope to return. A hard core, however, remains on site even as the dust rises around them. This lot love Park Hill and don't like the idea of living anywhere else.
Cut to last April, when all this started. Until now, I've never been inside Park Hill. Once I'm standing in the middle of it, though, two things strike me. The first is the sense of drama that builds as you walk through its courtyards, which get grander the higher the flats grow (built on a hill, the lowest tower sits on the site's highest point and vice versa); their embrace makes me think not of A Clockwork Orange but of the Colosseum in Rome. The second is the fact that Park Hill, unlike Robin Hood Gardens and its listed neighbour, Ernö Goldfinger's Balfron Tower, is not built of concrete. Its frame is concrete but its curtain walls are made of red, orange and yellow brick. Thanks to the damage wrought by heavy pollution, this is not something you can tell from the street.
Beside me, in the whipping cold, Grenville Squires, a caretaker who has worked here for 26 years - until recently, he lived here, too - is hopping with excitement. He loves tourists. 'The way it all fits together,' he says. 'It's like a jigsaw puzzle. I look at it as a feat of engineering. It was so clever. It had a district heating system - the only place with one like it was in Norway, where they'd capped a geyser - and a communal waste disposal system [this survived until the advent of disposable nappies]. When the new developers did a concrete survey, they found that it is not yet a third of the way through its life.'
We get in Grenville's electric cart, and he drives me along Park Hill's interconnected decks to prove that the now much derided 'streets in the sky' really were wide enough to take a milk float. When we get to a suitable vantage point, he attempts to describe the estate as it was. 'There were four pubs, a supermarket, a hardware shop, a butcher's, a ladies' shoe shop, a chip shop. It was like a medieval village; you didn't have to leave.'
So he doesn't believe that it was Park Hill's architects, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, who are to blame for what eventually became of the estate? That their design was too brutal, too idealistic, too rigidly controlling?
'No, it was the council's fault. They gave anyone who wanted one a flat and they didn't work hard enough at maintenance. She's lovely [the building]. She's my mistress, the only lady who's fetched me from the marital bed at two in the morning and made demands. She has come on hard times, but all she's got to do is wash her face and put on a new dress and she will be fine.'
At the Park Hill social club, I meet the hard core who remain in residence; they are of the same opinion. Brenda Hague was 22 when she moved into Park Hill on 7 December 1959. Was she full of foreboding as she took possession of her neat new flat with its covetable kitchen, a reconstruction of which I have just seen in Sheffield's Weston Park Museum? Not at all. 'It was luxury,' she says. 'Me, my husband and our baby were living in a back-to-back. My parents were there, too, and my brother. We had no bathroom, just a tin bath on the back of the door. So when we got here it was marvellous. Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It's lovely, especially at night, when it's all lit up.'
In those days, Park Hill was a quiet place, most of its tenants young families. But even when it began to be run down, in the 1980s, her fondness endured. 'It always felt safe to me. They say it looks horrible. Maybe it does from the outside. It's what's inside that counts. My son lives in Harrogate now and he has nothing but fond memories.'
How does she feel about the refurbishment? Pleased, so long as she can remain where she's always been. I ask her friend Edith Bradbury, another resident of almost half a century, if it's hard to imagine a new Park Hill, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of its previous incarnation. 'It is. But it was hard to imagine it when it first went up. All the little streets this replaced. Who'd have thought it?'
'Will it work? Will it be a success?' 'Yes. I think it is going to be lovely.'
Park Hill tells the story of a century. The streets it replaced were home to some of the worst slums in Europe, people living 400 to the acre in houses so tightly packed they barely saw the sun, their only access to water a standpipe in the yard. But they had work. The valley that Park Hill lords it over was home to steel mills, mines and the workshops of the Little Mesters, the craftsmen who made the finest cutlery in the world. Park Hill's fortunes faded as this industry evaporated into thin air; between 1979 and 1989, 53,000 jobs were lost in a city of 200,000.
What interests me, though, is what the estate tells us about our relationship with modern buildings. These days, a single structure can come to represent a world view, standing proxy for our aesthetics and our politics. I used to hate it and now I like it. Perhaps you think this tells you a lot about me, but it doesn't really. Or it shouldn't. Park Hill is only one building. This is why we should treat with caution the arguments of commentators like Simon Jenkins, the new chairman of the National Trust, who deride all Brutalist buildings, the 'ideologues' who created them and the intellectuals and theorists who praise them while choosing to live in Georgian terraces.
Brenda Hague is no theorist, nor is Ivor Smith an ideologue. 'When Reyner Banham [the architecture critic] called us Brutalists, we didn't know what it meant,' says Smith. 'We didn't think we were Brutalists. We thought we were quite nice guys.'
When work began on Park Hill in 1957, he and Lynn were young, newly qualified, full of youthful enthusiasm and inspired by the optimism abroad in postwar Britain, however austere. 'The Unité [by le Corbusier, in Marseille] had just been built and it was exciting. But it wasn't an infatuation. We'd also made drawings of John Wood's crescents in Bath.'
Returning to Park Hill after 35 years, he thought it looked 'marvellous' from the town. Was there anything he would have done differently? 'The decks. A street has windows at street level. But at Park Hill, conditioned by best value for money, we couldn't have windows on to the pavements.' Does he like Urban Splash's ideas? 'Yes, though if anything I think they could be more daring.'
What of those ideas? The company has produced a flash brochure to showcase its £130m refurbishment of Park Hill and it makes for cheering, if occasionally comic, reading. To the naysayers, it points out that the density of the site - 192 people per acre - is well in excess of what the government considers to be a sustainable community and that the flats' original plans are more generous than the boxes favoured by modern developers. So, Park Hill is a 'bruiser'.
The company will give it 'romance': oak trees, allotments, a wildflower meadow, crown green bowls, a dance studio, a high street ('a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker'). The marketeers write of wanting to build a 'yellow brick road' leading to a city sweet shop, Granelli's Spice ('spice' is a Sheffield word for sweets and Bertie Bassett one of its most famous sons). Cutest of all, the company will retain the graffiti that adorns Park Hill 13 storeys up and which once had a starring role in an Arctic Monkeys video: 'I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME'.
But none of this would be happening at all were it not for the building itself. English Heritage's controversial decision to confer Grade II* listed status on Park Hill in 1998, for its contribution to British Modernism, now seems prescient and wise. It surely would have been demolished otherwise and lots of identical, red-brick boxes stuck in its place. Of course, refurbishments of modernist buildings are extremely challenging and not all successful. In Islington, residents of Lubetkin's Spa Green Estate are taking legal action over the recent refurbishment of their homes, claiming the work was 'poor at best, and damaging at worst'.
But for the time being, the sense of hope and expectation at Park Hill is palpable. After my visit, I catch the bus home to our toasty old terrace and, over supper, I ask my mother, ever so politely, if she has thought about where she will live in her retirement.
Good, bad, ugly? Modernist landmarks
Royal College of Physicians, Regent's Park, London, by Denys Lasdun (1964)Most people know Lasdun for the Royal National Theatre, but this is miles better; its elegant sensibility seems to owe more to Frank Lloyd Wright thanle Corbusier.
Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk, by Alison and Peter Smithson (1949-1954)The building that made them famous: a steel frame with brick and glass panels, and a water tank high on a tower, it's a small-scale homage to Mies van der Rohe.
2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London, by Ernö Goldfinger (1938)Goldfinger is best known for his immense Brutalist tower blocks, Trellick Tower in North Kensington, and Balfron Tower in Poplar. Willow Road, his home, is more gentle and notable for its clever use of space and a spiral staircase designed by Ove Arup.
Trinity Square car park, Gateshead, by Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon (1969)Also known as the Get Carter car park, after the 1971 film in which it appears. See it now: its demolition is imminent. Gordon also designed the unpopular Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth - demolished in 2004 - and the Michael Faraday Memorial at Elephant and Castle in south London.
Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee, by Victor Pasmore (1963-1970)Controversial piece of abstract public art in the Sunny Blunts housing estate. A grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund has recently
Robin Hood Gardens
Introduction
Robin Hood Gardens (RHG), the 1970s housing development in east London by Alison
and Peter Smithson, is currently being considered for demolition and redevelopment, in
order to accommodate increased numbers of homes on the site. It is currently being
considered for listing: an announcement on this is likely during the course of the
competition.
We believe that RHG is an exceptional work of architecture which achieves good space
standards in its flats and a large amount of open space. It offers much-needed family-sized
units to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Demolition would also entail a high
loss of embodied energy.
All reasonable options for retaining it, while allowing for further development, should be
explored.
We also recognise that RHG has flaws as a place to live. Experience on other estates of
its generation has shown that such flaws can be addressed without wholesale
demolition. There is, however, a real need for change.
Robin Hood Gardens is important in itself, but also for the wider issues it raises about
the regeneration of developments of its period. At Park Hill in Sheffield plans are under
way to renew a comparable estate, while others are being or have been demolished.
These are essential issues for British cities as a whole.
The purpose of this International Ideas Competition, which is open and anonymous, is to
invite and generate proposals that show how the site can change and be intensified,
without destruction of the existing buildings or loss of the site’s essential qualities. These
proposals will inform and influence the ongoing debate about RHG in particular, and the
wider debate about the retention and transformation of buildings of its generation.
It is important that these ideas are considered in the context of the brief and the
aspiration of Tower Hamlets Council and English Partnerships to use this important site
to generate new affordable and market housing.
Qualified architects are invited to submit proposals that show how the site can be
renewed and transformed while retaining the best of the existing.
The winner and finalists will be chosen by a jury of leading architects and other
architectural figures, and will be published in a special feature in Building Design
magazine. This is your chance to take a leading part in one of the important current
debates in British architecture.
4
About Robin Hood Gardens
Robin Hood Gardens was designed in the late 1960s by architects Alison and Peter
Smithson. Completed in 1972, the housing complex in Poplar, east London, drew on the
idea of "streets in the sky", and was inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation
apartments in Marseille, France.
BD’s campaign to have the Smithsons’ building listed has attracted more than 2,000
signatures; the estate has been described as a seminal example of post-war social
housing design. Architecture minister Margaret Hodge will make her decision on whether
to list the building by April 30.
The Smithson building consists of two long blocks, one of ten stories and the other of
seven, built from pre-cast concrete slabs and containing 213 flats, surrounding a
landscaped green.
See also Appendices 2 and 3 and articles on RHG on www.bdonline.org.uk for further
information.
Brief
Technical Assessment
To ensure viability and to give greater weight to the proposals, the winning entry should
successfully take into account and act in response to the technical expectations of the
Blackwall Reach landowners, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH) and
English Partnerships (EP), whilst working towards their overall vision:
‘To provide new homes, new shops, broader community uses, improved
connectivity, new business premises and attractive new open spaces, all
underpinned by high quality urban design and architecture.’
Two options were presented for the Blackwall Reach Regeneration Project, the first
retaining Robin Hood Gardens, the second replacing Robin Hood Gardens with higher
density developments. The second option, demolition, was ratified at a cabinet meeting
on April 2.
The Competition
The purpose of the competition is therefore to propose a viable and creative solution in
response to the option of retaining Robin Hood Gardens. The proposal should propose
imaginative approaches to saving and transforming this existing 70s icon.
The competition entries need to show how Robin Hood Gardens (RHG) can be modified,
and include an amenity strategy to keep the existing open space - one of the unique
features of the estate.
The competition will also establish that retention of the estate is a greener option than
demolition, and hopes to influence the listing process which is current.
5
To achieve this objective we have outlined in the detail of this document the current
position as reported to the cabinet of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and to
enable entrants to fully understand the political context of the competition.
The success of the competition will be the mix of the creativity of the idea with the reality
of this wider political context.
Existing Land Uses
According to the report on the 1 August 2007 Cabinet meeting on the Blackwall Reach
Regeneration Project – Draft Development Framework, there are 252 homes in this site
area, of which 214 are within the RHG complex. In addition to housing, RHG provides
community and sporting facilities, as well as a large open space. It has been estimated
that a total of £20 million would be required to bring the dwellings up to Decent Homes
standards. There is a lack of shops, of well-run community facilities and the open spaces
are poorly maintained and under-used.
Key Principles for the Regeneration of the Area
Key principles for the site area, as reiterated in the minutes of the Cabinet meeting
mentioned above, should ensure:
- That there is a provision of quality commercial, community and leisure facilities
- That the Woolmore Primary School be retained and extended, along with any
additional community services needed to support the school.
- Freehold ownership of the land on which the Council’s homes are refurbished or
replaced will remain with the Council.
- The Woolmore Street properties of 1-22 Anderson House, 1-11 Mackrow Walk
and 2-10 (Evens) Woolmore Street would be proposed for demolition, to enhance
the available public space.
- Additional residential development will need to provide a minimum of 35%
affordable housing, together with the required levels of family housing across all
tenures, in accordance with the Council’s policies.
- This is likely to result in the provision of up to 800 new affordable homes
depending on whether Robin Hood Gardens is retained or redeveloped.
- The financial framework for the building of Council homes is not yet known.
- That there is no net loss of public open space and that there is the opportunity to
increase the amount of open space provision in the area and improve its quality.
- If the existing education, health, youth and community facilities are to be
redeveloped, they will need to be fully replaced with modern and improved
facilities of at least the same size to ensure they have the capacity to serve an
increased residential population.
- That pedestrian and cycle linkages to and from the area are improved.
Two Options, Three Variations
The draft Blackwall Reach Regeneration Development Framework presents two options
for the site area – one retaining Robin Hood Gardens, the other replacing the complex.
Each option can be further modified by decking and developing, entirely or partially, over
the Blackwall Tunnel approach, thereby also improving the access and pollution issues
relating to the site area. According to the Sustainability Appraisal of this document
(February 2008), the maximum potential of the two options compare as follows:
Issue Option 1A (retain existing
buildings; complete
decking over tunnel
approach)
Option 2A (replace
existing; complete
decking over tunnel
approach)
Housing 1,750-2,050 homes 2,500 – 3,000 homes
Open Space 1.5 hectares 2 hectares
Commercial Space
(including shops,
businesses and hotels)
33,500 SqM 36,000 SqM
Community and Health 1,150 SqM 1,650 SqM
Education 2,700 SqM 3,200 SqM
Leisure 700 SqM 700 SqM
Other issues
EP has identified other issues connected with RHG, such as the condition of its
concrete, the difficulty of accessing its services, and security considerations. However, it
is beyond the scope of the present ideas competition to address such questions in detail.
The purpose of this competition is primarily to address the larger-scale question of
intensifying the site.
Further Information
Further information on the two options initially proposed can be found below, as
extracted verbatim from the August 2007 Blackwall Reach Regeneration Project Draft
Development Framework. See Appendix 1
The other documents consulted for this brief are the March 2008 Blackwall Reach
Regeneration Project Development Framework (Final), the February 2008 Blackwall
Reach Development Framework Initial Sustainability Appraisal Report (Final) and the
Report on the 1 st August 2007 Cabinet meeting on the Blackwall Reach Regeneration
Project – Draft Development Framework.
Robin Hood Gardens (RHG), the 1970s housing development in east London by Alison
and Peter Smithson, is currently being considered for demolition and redevelopment, in
order to accommodate increased numbers of homes on the site. It is currently being
considered for listing: an announcement on this is likely during the course of the
competition.
We believe that RHG is an exceptional work of architecture which achieves good space
standards in its flats and a large amount of open space. It offers much-needed family-sized
units to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Demolition would also entail a high
loss of embodied energy.
All reasonable options for retaining it, while allowing for further development, should be
explored.
We also recognise that RHG has flaws as a place to live. Experience on other estates of
its generation has shown that such flaws can be addressed without wholesale
demolition. There is, however, a real need for change.
Robin Hood Gardens is important in itself, but also for the wider issues it raises about
the regeneration of developments of its period. At Park Hill in Sheffield plans are under
way to renew a comparable estate, while others are being or have been demolished.
These are essential issues for British cities as a whole.
The purpose of this International Ideas Competition, which is open and anonymous, is to
invite and generate proposals that show how the site can change and be intensified,
without destruction of the existing buildings or loss of the site’s essential qualities. These
proposals will inform and influence the ongoing debate about RHG in particular, and the
wider debate about the retention and transformation of buildings of its generation.
It is important that these ideas are considered in the context of the brief and the
aspiration of Tower Hamlets Council and English Partnerships to use this important site
to generate new affordable and market housing.
Qualified architects are invited to submit proposals that show how the site can be
renewed and transformed while retaining the best of the existing.
The winner and finalists will be chosen by a jury of leading architects and other
architectural figures, and will be published in a special feature in Building Design
magazine. This is your chance to take a leading part in one of the important current
debates in British architecture.
4
About Robin Hood Gardens
Robin Hood Gardens was designed in the late 1960s by architects Alison and Peter
Smithson. Completed in 1972, the housing complex in Poplar, east London, drew on the
idea of "streets in the sky", and was inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation
apartments in Marseille, France.
BD’s campaign to have the Smithsons’ building listed has attracted more than 2,000
signatures; the estate has been described as a seminal example of post-war social
housing design. Architecture minister Margaret Hodge will make her decision on whether
to list the building by April 30.
The Smithson building consists of two long blocks, one of ten stories and the other of
seven, built from pre-cast concrete slabs and containing 213 flats, surrounding a
landscaped green.
See also Appendices 2 and 3 and articles on RHG on www.bdonline.org.uk for further
information.
Brief
Technical Assessment
To ensure viability and to give greater weight to the proposals, the winning entry should
successfully take into account and act in response to the technical expectations of the
Blackwall Reach landowners, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH) and
English Partnerships (EP), whilst working towards their overall vision:
‘To provide new homes, new shops, broader community uses, improved
connectivity, new business premises and attractive new open spaces, all
underpinned by high quality urban design and architecture.’
Two options were presented for the Blackwall Reach Regeneration Project, the first
retaining Robin Hood Gardens, the second replacing Robin Hood Gardens with higher
density developments. The second option, demolition, was ratified at a cabinet meeting
on April 2.
The Competition
The purpose of the competition is therefore to propose a viable and creative solution in
response to the option of retaining Robin Hood Gardens. The proposal should propose
imaginative approaches to saving and transforming this existing 70s icon.
The competition entries need to show how Robin Hood Gardens (RHG) can be modified,
and include an amenity strategy to keep the existing open space - one of the unique
features of the estate.
The competition will also establish that retention of the estate is a greener option than
demolition, and hopes to influence the listing process which is current.
5
To achieve this objective we have outlined in the detail of this document the current
position as reported to the cabinet of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and to
enable entrants to fully understand the political context of the competition.
The success of the competition will be the mix of the creativity of the idea with the reality
of this wider political context.
Existing Land Uses
According to the report on the 1 August 2007 Cabinet meeting on the Blackwall Reach
Regeneration Project – Draft Development Framework, there are 252 homes in this site
area, of which 214 are within the RHG complex. In addition to housing, RHG provides
community and sporting facilities, as well as a large open space. It has been estimated
that a total of £20 million would be required to bring the dwellings up to Decent Homes
standards. There is a lack of shops, of well-run community facilities and the open spaces
are poorly maintained and under-used.
Key Principles for the Regeneration of the Area
Key principles for the site area, as reiterated in the minutes of the Cabinet meeting
mentioned above, should ensure:
- That there is a provision of quality commercial, community and leisure facilities
- That the Woolmore Primary School be retained and extended, along with any
additional community services needed to support the school.
- Freehold ownership of the land on which the Council’s homes are refurbished or
replaced will remain with the Council.
- The Woolmore Street properties of 1-22 Anderson House, 1-11 Mackrow Walk
and 2-10 (Evens) Woolmore Street would be proposed for demolition, to enhance
the available public space.
- Additional residential development will need to provide a minimum of 35%
affordable housing, together with the required levels of family housing across all
tenures, in accordance with the Council’s policies.
- This is likely to result in the provision of up to 800 new affordable homes
depending on whether Robin Hood Gardens is retained or redeveloped.
- The financial framework for the building of Council homes is not yet known.
- That there is no net loss of public open space and that there is the opportunity to
increase the amount of open space provision in the area and improve its quality.
- If the existing education, health, youth and community facilities are to be
redeveloped, they will need to be fully replaced with modern and improved
facilities of at least the same size to ensure they have the capacity to serve an
increased residential population.
- That pedestrian and cycle linkages to and from the area are improved.
Two Options, Three Variations
The draft Blackwall Reach Regeneration Development Framework presents two options
for the site area – one retaining Robin Hood Gardens, the other replacing the complex.
Each option can be further modified by decking and developing, entirely or partially, over
the Blackwall Tunnel approach, thereby also improving the access and pollution issues
relating to the site area. According to the Sustainability Appraisal of this document
(February 2008), the maximum potential of the two options compare as follows:
Issue Option 1A (retain existing
buildings; complete
decking over tunnel
approach)
Option 2A (replace
existing; complete
decking over tunnel
approach)
Housing 1,750-2,050 homes 2,500 – 3,000 homes
Open Space 1.5 hectares 2 hectares
Commercial Space
(including shops,
businesses and hotels)
33,500 SqM 36,000 SqM
Community and Health 1,150 SqM 1,650 SqM
Education 2,700 SqM 3,200 SqM
Leisure 700 SqM 700 SqM
Other issues
EP has identified other issues connected with RHG, such as the condition of its
concrete, the difficulty of accessing its services, and security considerations. However, it
is beyond the scope of the present ideas competition to address such questions in detail.
The purpose of this competition is primarily to address the larger-scale question of
intensifying the site.
Further Information
Further information on the two options initially proposed can be found below, as
extracted verbatim from the August 2007 Blackwall Reach Regeneration Project Draft
Development Framework. See Appendix 1
The other documents consulted for this brief are the March 2008 Blackwall Reach
Regeneration Project Development Framework (Final), the February 2008 Blackwall
Reach Development Framework Initial Sustainability Appraisal Report (Final) and the
Report on the 1 st August 2007 Cabinet meeting on the Blackwall Reach Regeneration
Project – Draft Development Framework.
Primer
The area of interior architecture that interests me is regeneration. I have always been interested in the historical aspect of architecture, and the renovation of old buildings. I also have an interest in historical urban planning, such as Christopher Wren’s European approach to the old Anglo style of street lay out and similarly the Post War Britain planning of towns by the likes of Sir Frederick Gibbered.
Human interaction with buildings through out the ages has always affected my choices of contemporary design. I believe we should learn from our previous endeavours and use them in this current era.
The modern outlook on urban regeneration is to destroy or flatten a run down area and replace it with new glass and steel creations making the area uniform and mono-material or giving it a single palleted appearance. Regeneration should incorporate buildings of the past into the more contemporary structure. An example of this which interests me is the Esplanade Hotel on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin Germany. Here the original stone shell of the building, which fell into neglect, was incorporated into its regeneration. The original stone shell is encased within a layer of protective glass and steel, thus preserving its historical integrity but also extending its functional use for generations to come. The original stone shell has become a feature of the hotel, an aesthetic piece of art.
I believe that to maintain the history of architecture and our precedents, regeneration should where possible protect our heritage.
I would be interested to increase my knowledge in this area. My opinion is that, given the over-population of the South East of England at the moment, regeneration is the key. I would like to explore different options on how to regenerate areas, giving consideration to history and heritage, whilst considering the impact this will have on the environment, society and future regeneration.
Whilst carrying out research for projects contributing towards my under graduate degree, I was intrigued by the close correlation between interior architecture and the field of social geography. By this I mean how architects need to find a balance between design and social function. If the balance is wrong it can have an adverse effect on the economic and social structure of the area, which could lead to a downward spiral. If a balance is perfected, it could greatly benefit the building and its vicinity.
Human interaction with buildings through out the ages has always affected my choices of contemporary design. I believe we should learn from our previous endeavours and use them in this current era.
The modern outlook on urban regeneration is to destroy or flatten a run down area and replace it with new glass and steel creations making the area uniform and mono-material or giving it a single palleted appearance. Regeneration should incorporate buildings of the past into the more contemporary structure. An example of this which interests me is the Esplanade Hotel on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin Germany. Here the original stone shell of the building, which fell into neglect, was incorporated into its regeneration. The original stone shell is encased within a layer of protective glass and steel, thus preserving its historical integrity but also extending its functional use for generations to come. The original stone shell has become a feature of the hotel, an aesthetic piece of art.
I believe that to maintain the history of architecture and our precedents, regeneration should where possible protect our heritage.
I would be interested to increase my knowledge in this area. My opinion is that, given the over-population of the South East of England at the moment, regeneration is the key. I would like to explore different options on how to regenerate areas, giving consideration to history and heritage, whilst considering the impact this will have on the environment, society and future regeneration.
Whilst carrying out research for projects contributing towards my under graduate degree, I was intrigued by the close correlation between interior architecture and the field of social geography. By this I mean how architects need to find a balance between design and social function. If the balance is wrong it can have an adverse effect on the economic and social structure of the area, which could lead to a downward spiral. If a balance is perfected, it could greatly benefit the building and its vicinity.
Influences
HONGKONG
I visited Hong Kong at the age of 7 and this is where I believe I gained my interest in architecture as it was under British rule and due to the high density became a hive of architecture.
History and Architecture
3d virtual enviroments and intrest in CAD plus my intrest in history and this image sums it up, it is a virtual enviroment within the game of Assassins Creed and is the city of Acre during the year 1185 during the 3rd Crusade.
Designe
rsFuture systems have been a major influence on designs because they are playful and fun, but mostly not taken seriously.
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