Another One Bites The Dust: Robin Hood Gardens
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.28.08
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.”
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
If they would just wait about ten years, the damn thing would be fashionable again. Look what happened with that brutalist tower in Knotting Hill. Now the apartments are fetching big prices.
Darn, that's ugly. It looks like a cross between an industrial chickenhouse, a factory, and a Motel 6. How the heck can you fix that abomination?
When there are old buildings that still retain structural embedded energy, I think we should encourage creative redesign and development.
In a poetry class a professor had us break up old poems and with creativity alter them, reading them aloud in many different ways. I appreciated the written word a bit more after this experience.
I think that some buildings slated for demolition could instead, like the poetry, be reinterpreted into what we currently can use and appreciate.