Another One Bites The Dust: Robin Hood Gardens

When I was in architecture school my favourite architects were the Archigram gang, but if you asked me about those who actually built things and were making real changes in the way things worked in the world, I would have pointed to Alison and Peter Smithson and Robin Hood Gardens. History has not been kind to them or their buildings, but it is still an icon and an inspiration.

Now it is under threat of demolition; preservationists are demanding that it be listed as an historic structure. The Minister of Culture, channelling an earlier French Minister Andre Malraux, suggests that we can build an architectural museum without walls-" This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”

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Documentation is not good enough. Everyone who defends concrete construction talks about how long it lasts, yet here were are talking about destroying great bones that are not that old at all. Fix it, don't blow it away.

Amanda Baillieu writes "This is not simply because we believe the building is architecturally important. The issue goes far beyond architecture and raises questions about exactly why vast resources are thrown at demolishing buildings simply because they are seen to belong to the unfashionable ideology of a previous era."

Join an extraordinary list of petitioners including Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Alain de Botton , Peter Cook, Joseph Rykwert, Paul Bedford and Zaha Hadid in the campaign to save this building. ::BDONLINE