Emmett Zeifman , Extensions and Limits

The limits of architecture are thematic in the often taken to be derivative of Le Corbusier’s form of Alison and Peter Smithsons’ Robin urban proposals of the 1920s. But the project, Hood Gardens, which was designed in several a discrete work of architecture rather than iterations beginning in 1963 and was completed urbanism, diverges from its antecedents within in 1972. By limits, I mean three distinct but the Smithsons’ body of work and the architec- related conditions: the formal limits that a work tural history in which the Smithsons were im- of architecture establishes between inside and mersed, producing qualities and possibilities for outside; the disciplinary limits between architec- critical interpretation specific to its form and ture, urbanism and landscape; and the broadly the context in which it was produced. cultural limits that constrain the possibilities of Previous critiques of Robin Hood Gardens architectural thought and production at a given have generally been made along two related lines, moment in time. The project consists in part of both characteristic of the architectural debates a series of concrete means of separating the in- of the period.2 The first is that the project does terior of the site from its surroundings; elements not advance an idea of urbanism commensurate of building, infrastructure and landscape are with the Smithsons’ previously stated ambitions formally integrated towards the definition of this to produce a new model of the city suited to an urban precinct; the physical and cultural context emerging postwar society. These ambitions were N A M F ZEI in which the project was designed and built first articulated in their entry in the 1952 Golden constrains its form. While the limits described Lane housing competition—which called for an above can be understood as fundamental to any incrementally developing network of branch- work of architecture, what distinguishes Robin ing slab buildings linked by elevated pedestrian Hood Gardens when examined in these terms is decks—and then elaborated in the Smithsons’ the extent to which the project continues to offer presentation of their “Urban Re-Identification” insights into the conditions—both within the grille at CIAM IX in 1953 (leading to their role discipline and without—in which contemporary in the subsequent dissolution of CIAM and architecture is produced.1 founding of Team X), as well as in the contem- Robin Hood Gardens is today the subject of poraneous “Urban Re-Identification” manifesto. renewed attention in Britain due to its impend- The latter was not published in full until 1970, ing demolition, however the project has not, in however, where it was positioned as a direct the decades since its completion, been substan- theoretical predecessor of Robin Hood Gardens tively reconsidered on formal grounds or with in the Smithson’s book Ordinariness and Light, respect to subsequent developments in the dis- unambiguously subtitled Urban Theories 1952- cipline. The largest of the Smithsons’ relatively 60 and their Application in a Building Project few built works and the only significant urban 1963-70. In part for this reason, Golden Lane has housing project that they realized, Robin Hood often been taken as the model from which Robin Gardens has typically been evaluated in relation Hood Gardens is derived and the standard by to models of urbanism previously elaborated by which it is to be evaluated, despite clear distinc- the Smithsons, models which are themselves tions in the form and scope of the latter project.

1. This article is developed from research conducted while the analysis of the project upon its completion. Eisenman, “From 2013-14 Yale Bass Scholar in Architecture at the University Golden Lane to Robin Hood Gardens. Or If You Follow the of Cambridge. It rests in part on materials held at the Alison Yellow Brick Road, It May Not Lead to Golders Green,” Robin Hood Gardens, and Peter Smithson Archive at the Frances Loeb Library at the Oppositions 1 (1973): 27-56. Republished in Alison & Peter , UK, 1970. Photo Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Smithson: A Critical Anthology, ed. Max Risselada (Barcelona: by Peter Smithson. 2. Most comprehensively argued by Peter Eisenman in his formal Polígrafia, 2011), 207-227.

34 PROJECT I ssue 4 35 The second argument is that, as designed and Gardens in relation to their earlier proposals British welfare state that had been so central to Golden Lane model of linked slab buildings as built, Robin Hood Gardens fails to present an for urban housing contributed to the negative the Smithsons’ early imagination of the possibili- the project evolved, opting to pursue a strategy image and form of commensurate reception of the project.6 ties for their architecture.7 If the extant city was in which the formal definition and coherence of with the aspirations of its inhabitants. This posi- More importantly, the ambivalence towards increasingly a formal model for architecture in the edges and interior of the site superseded their tion was elaborated by Charles Jencks in his cel- architecture and its role in the city that the this period, there was an inversely proportional earlier interest in establishing the seeds of a new ebration of the death of modernist architecture in Smithsons expressed in their discussions of Rob- decrease in architects’ ambitions and opportuni- and potentially extensive architectural-infra- The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, where in Hood Gardens reveals the extent to which the ties to effect the wholesale transformation of that structural network. The Smithsons enact strict his critique of Robin Hood Gardens followed the project was a product of the shifting disciplinary city and its society. limits around and within the site, establishing famous introductory passage dating modernism’s and cultural terrain in which architects were This shifting disciplinary and cultural con- layered formal boundaries that separate the inte- end to the moment the first of Minoru Yamasaki’s operating in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when text contributes to the melancholy air that sur- rior of the site from its surroundings. The project Pruitt-Igoe slabs were imploded.3 The perceived the assumption that architecture should address rounds the project. It also, however, allows us to has literal walls and moats and its buildings are failure of the Smithsons to translate their stated urban and social reform that had underpinned so understand Robin Hood Gardens not as a late expressed as a protective perimeter enclosing the interest in historic urban precincts such as Grey’s much architectural production since the Victori- instantiation of discredited architectural ideals public, pedestrian landscape at its center. While Inn in London and the Royal Crescent at Bath an era, if not before, was increasingly questioned. but as an early manifestation of contemporary the buildings have wide, open-air access decks, into a model of lasting function and concerns; that is, as an anachronism, but one the potential of these to link to other buildings as appeal is taken as representative of that points towards the future rather than the “streets” is suppressed through the articulation the disconnect between the words past, anticipating architecture’s relationship to of the ends of the slabs—typologically, the stand- and deeds of modernist architecture the city in the present. In this respect, it is a fit- alone slab buildings of the project should be con- that was central to the postmodern- ting coincidence that Robin Hood Gardens was sidered closer to the closed circulation of the Uni- ist critiques of Jencks and others.4 By completed in the same year that the first build- té d’Habitation, for instance, than the networked the standards of these arguments, ings of Pruitt-Igoe were demolished. Where immeubles villas of the Ville Contemporaine, to Robin Hood Gardens has generally once the juxtaposition of the two projects might which they have previously been compared. The been understood as a compromised have suggested a failure on the Smithsons’ parts formal boundaries, the contained pedestrian anachronism, neither radical nor to change with , stubbornly insisting realm and the provision of private parking ga-

ameliorative enough, a late instan- that a compromised fragment of a decades old rages for tenants in the project suggest the extent N A M F ZEI tiation of an exhausted modernism theory could be a socially progressive project, to which the Smithsons’ questioned not only the that had been proven incapable of today it suggests a more potent sense of tempo- notion of a new pedestrian infrastructure, but the

CRITIQUES living up to its promises of produc- ral disjunction, the image of a richer architec- necessity of relating to a traditional pedestrian ing a new and better world. ture rising from the rubble of its predecessors, neighborhood, while the deformation of the slab The Smithsons were aware of richer precisely because of the formal complex- buildings, their articulation and the scale of the and discussed these arguments in ity born out of the Smithsons’ engagement with project reveal the Smithsons’ engagement with interviews, even before the project the changing constraints of the period. the forms of the surrounding infrastructure and was complete or had been publicly building fabric, from major roads to monumental criticized by their peers.5 Though industrial sites to vernacular row housing. they were clear in their ambition to * * * In all aspects of the design, Robin Hood Gar- coherently define a singular urban dens becomes more specific to its site and more space through the form of the The divergence of Robin Hood Gardens from singular and discrete as an architectural proposal Top. Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, MO, 1972. Above. Robin Hood Gardens, 1972. project, rather than to instanti- Photo by Sandra Lousada. those models of architecture and urbanism that as the Smithsons developed it throughout the ate a new urban system, they also the Smithsons had previously articulated—par- intermittent, years-long design process. With questioned whether they should ticularly the branching slab buildings of Golden Robin Hood Gardens, the Smithsons establish a have proposed a purer diagram of urbanism or This was not merely a shift in critical discourse Lane and the symmetrically arrayed buildings coherent and complex language for the definition whether, in fact, any attempt to address broader or the popular reception of architecture, but framing a central green in the Mehringplatz proj- of a site within the city that is at once contextu- urban and social questions through architecture one related to the waning power of the state as ect (1962)—can be traced through their work- ally responsive and autonomous, representing was futile. In so doing, they acknowledged the a patron of architecture and force for transfor- ing drawings, which reveal the evolution of the an attempt to critically engage with present and extent to which their positioning of Robin Hood mative urban change, in this case the postwar project from the first stage of the design (referred future patterns of urban development rather to as Manisty Street) to its built form. These than proposing to overturn them. They do so by 3. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New (London: Twentieth Century Society, 2010); “Interview with A+P : Rizzoli, 1977). Smithson,” Architektuur Fragmenten (1982), E070, The Alison drawings show the extent to which the Smithsons integrating aspects of urbanism, architecture and 4. See, for instance: Colin Rowe, “Introduction,” in Five and Peter Smithson Archive, Special Collections, Frances initially considered and then departed from the landscape into the project at a scale realizable by Architects, ed. Arthur Drexler (New York: Wittenborn, 1972); Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, Mass.; 6. It should be noted that the project, though it would later suffer London: MIT, 1978). from the failures of management, maintenance and security 7. For more on the political context in which the Smithsons (and Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain 5. Alison and Peter Smithson, “Broadcast 10 July, 1970, BBC2,” that plagued so many postwar social housing projects, was their contemporaries) worked, see: Nicholas Bullock, and Beyond, eds. Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman (New republished in Robin Hood Gardens Re-Visions, ed. Alan Powers well received by residents in its first years of occupation. “Building the Socialist Dream or Housing the Socialist State? Haven: Yale, 2010); Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Design versus the Production of Housing in the 1960s,” in Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002).

36 PROJECT I ssue 4 37 Golden Lane (1952), Mehringplatz (1965) (Scale Approximate). Manisty Street (1963), Robin Hood Gardens (1968) (Scale Approximate).

the sole designer, therefore revealing techniques similarly suggests both continuity with and make knowing reference to the vertical I-beams of bombed urban centers—and turn of century and strategies for the inevitable negotiations departure from traditional, as well as modernist, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s building facades, here —where the terraced central garden between part (architecture) and whole (city) that models of housing. The buildings express the rendered in pre-cast concrete, after having ap- of the , the first public housing a work of urban architecture must enter into. kind variation within repetitive structures and peared in painted steel in the Hunstanton School project in London, was formed of ruins from the The slabs of Robin Hood Gardens are seg- street/garden sidedness of the terraced block (1949-54) and in stone cladding in the Economist buildings demolished to make way for it. mented and bent to conform to the geometry of and the court and crescent that define the scale Buildings (1959-64). The articulation of the facade The landform also represents an entirely the major streets that define the perimeter of the and organization of housing in traditional mod- speaks to the Smithsons’ disciplinary influences different scale or character of time than that site, rather than following the idealized cardinal els of British urbanism, while departing from and their desires to extend, in their own particular of the recent history of the site, occupying an orientation of CIAM housing or the branching the modest height and muted gentility of those fashion, an architectural language initiated by ontologically ambiguous position between E N A M F ZEI networks of the Golden Lane model. They depart references. The effects of the mass and surface Mies van der Rohe’s postwar work, while chal- natural and constructed and provoking the as well from the geometry of contemporane- of Robin Hood Gardens are no less austere than lenging the universal deployment of that language basic questions, “what is it made of?” or “where ous projects such as Candilis, Josic and Woods’ those produced by Georgian architect-planners across building types and sites, autonomous from did it come from?” Any notion of the natural or CRITIQUES plan for Toulouse le Mirail (itself related to the and Victorian developers, vertically striated con- their specific requirements and contexts. given in the Smithsons’ discourse and work is branching “stem” buildings of Golden Lane) that crete facades taking the place of relentless vistas The most distinctive formal quality in Robin immediately undercut by the evident construc- are segmented and bent systematically in service of brick. The model of the row house, with its Hood Gardens is the way in which landscape is tion of that nature, whether the earthworks at of the production of an ex novo pattern of urban particularly British weighting of the relationship made an integral element of the project. Rather the center of the project or the “landscape” of development, rather than idiosyncratically in between the individual and the collective, is on than being residual to the architecture—the urban infrastructure and industrial monuments relation to an extant urban context. While the the one hand recalled and the other challenged, ground against which the building figures are (among which they counted the Thames, its slabs of Robin Hood Gardens deform to the the project suggesting two or three stacked lay- set or the void defined by them—landscape is banks in East London the subject of intense ma- physical context of the surrounding area, extant ers of traditional two and three-story tall rows made a spatially “positive” element within the nipulation over centuries) that they positioned internal streets within the site boundary are re- of worker’s housing. The deep horizontal cuts on composition of the site. This is achieved through the project in visual and formal relation to. moved to maximize the continuity of the linear the street-side of the slabs and the multi-story the landform, which is an integral but overlooked The form of the project thus extends architec- buildings and their access decks, allowing for voids punched through them at their inflection aspect of the Smithsons’ urban and architectural ture’s representation of the varied temporalities of a distinct scale of linear building and cohesive points likewise produce distinct scales of formal theory and practice from Golden Lane onwards.8 the city from the fleeting moments of spontane- public space to be established on the site. The articulation when compared to contemporane- In the Smithsons’ work, the landform is a spatial ous social engagement that were so crucial to the slabs also appear to bend around the constructed ous slab housing projects. and material transformation of the history of Smithsons’ rhetoric on the city in their early work, landforms at the center of the project, destabiliz- These oscillations between contextual and the site. In the case of Robin Hood Gardens, the as evident in their use of Nigel Henderson’s photo- ing any presumption of an ideal or natural state autonomous formal gestures carry through to the landforms are literally composed of the material graphs of children playing in the terraced streets on which the project is dependent—whether details of the project. Like the vertical subdivi- of the buildings demolished to make way for the of on the “Urban Re-Identification” prior urban forms, a new urban plan or seeming- sions of a traditional street-wall, the variegated project, a strategy elaborated not only by the grille (which were then recalled by the photos they ly persistent topographical features (of the kind concrete skin of the building façades precisely Smithsons in earlier texts, but in related contexts commissioned from Sandra Lousada of children that condition Le Corbusier’s projects for Algiers indexes the internal arrangement of the indi- such as post-war Germany—where parks were playing on the mounds and decks of Robin Hood and Rio de Janeiro, for instance), all of which ap- vidual housing units and access decks, while also created out of mounds of ruins removed from Gardens) to deeply embedded material and even pear to be both registered and challenged in the serving the environmental needs of the program,

form of the project. which required noise baffling exterior fins due 8. See, among others, discussions and representations of the Burrows Lea Farm, as well as subsequent work of the 1970s The articulation of the facades and internal to the traffic noise from the major thoroughfares landform in various projects of the mid-1950s, including such as Tees Pudding and Melbourne’s Magic Mountains. circulation of the slabs of Robin Hood Gardens surrounding the site. At the same time, these fins “Urban Re-Identification,” Bark Place Mews and Bates’

38 PROJECT I ssue 4 39 E N A M F ZEI Robin Hood Gardens, 2013. Photo by author. Robin Hood Gardens, 2013. Photo by author.

seemingly geological histories of a site that exceed theoretical, technological and aesthetic shifts of tion of architecture and site can be found in autonomous from its physical and cultural con- CRITIQUES any expression of specifically human construction the period, and becoming particularly apparent the work of a number of subsequent architects, text. While this comparison does not suggest or occupation. Through the synthesis of architec- in the wake of stylistic postmodernism. extending to the present. One can imagine, any direct influence of Robin Hood Gardens on tural and landscape forms, Robin Hood Gardens In this respect, there are three identifiable for instance, the inflected slabs, articulated subsequent work—certainly not of the intensity makes formally manifest representations of new, formal traits that emerge in the project for Robin facades and constructed topography of Robin of influence that the work of Le Corbusier or old and a kind of timelessness, oriented towards Hood Gardens: the deformation or inflection of Hood Gardens as an evolutionary step between Mies van der Rohe exerted on the Smithsons— both the future and the past in a way that sur- a modernist typology such as the slab build- the formal (and theoretical) separation of its reveals ways in which Robin Hood Gardens passes the limits of idealizing either as generative ing by what might be called “site forces,” or the vertical building and horizontal ground in Le can be read in relation to contemporary ques- standards for architectural production. historical accumulation of infrastructure, build- Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and the mutual tions of urban architectural form as much as in ing mass, views and other contextual cues that entanglement of building and ground (achieved relation to projects by the Smithsons and others are translated into vectors or limits that shape in part through the articulated surface of the that preceded it. * * * the massing and orientation of the project; the facade) in varied works by Morphosis, including articulation of the facade in a manner that is both the San Francisco Federal Building and unbuilt The strategies deployed in Robin Hood Gardens indexical of internal organization or structural projects such as the NYC 2012 Olympic Village * * * constitute an attempt to critically advance and environmental performance and embedded and their proposal for the site of the World the formal language of modernist architec- with disciplinary or cultural meaning that ex- Trade Center. To these formal techniques, one In its form, Robin Hood Gardens resembles ture through engagement with locally specific ceeds its basic construction and function; and the could add the consistent interest among the parentheses, two linear buildings bending conditions and models of architecture, while formal equivalency of building mass and ground, three architects (across sixty-odd years) in the towards each other around the green mounds not foregoing the ambition to imagine and with the topographic expression of the land- circulation devices of the skip-stop elevator they contain, an exception within the unfolding represent alternatives to these given contexts. scape acting in relation to the deformation of the (allowing for units that span the width of the text of the city that offers critical commentary From the present, it is apparent that this form building mass to produce a formally integrated slab) and the corridor represented as a street, on that city. At once the project prompts reflec- of inflected modernism has been a significant relationship between site and building. expressing a desire not to replace the city, but tions on the discipline of architecture itself and mode of operation for architects for much of The simultaneous deployment of these to internalize aspects of its organization and the limits, imposed from within and without, the second-half of the twentieth century and techniques of manipulating mass, facade and function within a new scale of architectural that constrain those working within the disci- into the twenty-first, carrying through various ground towards the synthetic formal resolu- project that is considered both analogous to and pline. It is instructive that, until recently, the

40 PROJECT I ssue 4 41 der Rohe’s postwar work, Robin Hood Gardens is tecture that resists the homogenizing development a model for operating within the limits imposed of the late capitalist city (either through cultural on architecture by the broader cultural forces specificity or formal abstraction, both of which embodied in the contemporary city, at the same could be read in the project), though its history as time that it does not merely reproduce the models a built work reveals the limits of such positions.12 established by those forces. A close reading of Robin Hood Gardens, however, Robin Hood Gardens was conceived and built suggests further possibilities for analysis of its po- in the context of a city—and particularly in the litical valences in relation to the condemnations of context of the East London Docklands—in the social housing in which it has been implicated, as midst of the radical social and physical trans- well as the municipal policies and urban develop- formations of de-industrialization, the winding ment practices that contributed to its perceived down of welfare state social and urban develop- failure as social housing, and that have led to plans ment programs, the emergence of new models of for its demolition and replacement.13 public-private development, increasing automobile To evaluate an individual architect or work of ownership, changing consumer behaviour, new architecture on their ability to put forward a plan patterns of immigra- for the city or for their tion and other shifts ability to overcome that have come to the social, economic characterize the and political forces postwar period. The that dictate the func- Smithsons were con- tioning of social hous- scious of this context ing (or any program) and the challenges it is to miss the oppor- posed to architecture, tunity to read works

if ambiguous in their of architecture not as N A M F ZEI Robin Hood Gardens, 2013. Photo by author. articulations of how to proposals for the im- address it. Robin Hood provement of society, landforms of Robin Hood Gardens, perhaps its The Smithsons discussed their urban projects CRITIQUES Gardens does not rep- futile or otherwise, most distinctive and significant feature, have as “fragments of utopia,” individual pieces that resent a proposition for but as representa- been unacknowledged in critical commentary represented the possibility of a new whole, and a revolutionized city or tions of the position of on the project, presumably because they were referred to Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building society, rather its form and possibilities that understood to have fallen outside the disciplin- and Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation as models 10 registers this changing exist for architecture ary bounds of architecture and architectural of this approach. However, they acknowledged context, representing within the broader criticism. And yet it is precisely through the that the individual part that is architecture could an acknowledgement culture at a given formal integration of building and landscape no longer initiate the development of a new whole, that these revolutions moment. While this Robin Hood Gardens, c. 1968. Axonometric Drawing. in response to the urban context in which the a position that can be understood to mark a shift were already under way reveals the limits project was developed that Robin Hood Gar- that occurred in the postwar period towards a due to forces beyond of architecture as a dens represents a contribution to the history contemporary understanding of the limits of the the grasp of architects, displacing the transforma- means of effecting measurable social change, it of postwar architecture, which can be read not possibilities of architecture with respect to the tive ambitions of earlier generations. As Robin also reveals the lasting potential of architectural only in reference to subsequent work, but as a extant city. Robin Hood Gardens can therefore Hood Gardens takes the form of an enclave—or form to act as a means of representing difference persistent model for the production of new ar- be read in light of Mies van der Rohe’s statement, a space of difference set apart within the city by and of suggesting alternative possibilities for the chitecture (even in the moment that it has been made after his move to the sprawling automotive its clear formal boundaries—it could be read in occupation of the urban environment that might condemned). To paraphrase Peter Eisenman’s metropolises of the American Midwest, that the anticipation of subsequent arguments for an archi- emerge within the contemporary city. summation of the Smithsons’ architectural city has become a vast jungle, within which all one 9 ethic, Robin Hood Gardens is neither naive, can do is attempt to make a clearing—that there 11. “There are no cities, in fact, any more…it goes on like a 20 (1983). The latter has been recently articulated by cynical nor pragmatic in its engagement with is no longer any point in architecture aspiring to forest…that is the reason why we cannot have the old cities Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture any more…that is gone forever…planned city and so on…We (Cambridge, Mass.; London: 2011). It should be noted that the the city. It exists in fertile territory somewhere urban planning, but that architects should strive should think about the means…that we have to live in a enclave can also be understood as the model par excellence between and beyond these positions—a terri- towards the formal delineation of urban buildings jungle…and maybe we do well by that.” Ludwig Mies van der of late capitalist urban development, as argued, for instance, tory that today it seems increasingly important set against the untameable expanses of the con- Rohe, quoted in Phyllis Lambert, “Seagram: Union of Building by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of 11 and Landscape,” Design Observer, 8 April 2013, accessed 23 Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke, 1997) and elsewhere. to discover and operate from. temporary urban environment. Like Mies van July 2014, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/seagram- 13. Of the kind made, for instance, by Katherine G. Bristol, “The union-of-building-and-landscape/37758/. Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44:3 (1991), 9. Eisenman, “From Golden Lane,” 223. Peter Smithson Archive, Special Collections, Frances Loeb 12. An argument for the former can be found in Kenneth 449-97, or Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and 10. Smithsons, “The Fragmentary Utopia,” E040, The Alison and Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2010).

42 PROJECT I ssue 4 43