Questions of Taste

"In order to really appreciate architecture you might even have to commit a murder", wrote Bernard Tschumi in his book Questions of Space. Leafing through a slightly dog eared copy of The Language of Post Modern Architecture (as you do) I came across an odd piece of evidence of exactly that. In the grainy shot above New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger mimes the act of murdering someone in one of the stair lobbies of Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens.

Presumably the point Goldberger was trying to make was that Robin Hood Gardens was a muggers paradise. His pretend violence was aimed as much at the architecture as it was some phantom victim and in that sense acts as an eerie premonition of the buildings likely demolition. The photograph is included in a chapter called The Death of Modern Architecture and fits into a familiar enough story about the perceived failure of streets in the sky, lack of defensible space and other sins of brutalism. But, as the recent ongoing refurbishment of the Smithsons inspired Park Hill in Sheffield prove, the problems of this kind of modernism are more about taste than they are about space. By which I mean, for people who want to live there and who can now afford to, Park Hill is a viable form of housing*.

The current obsession with systems of spatial control and surveillance in new housing developments (documented recently by Anna Minton) are supposed to eradicate the chances of Goldberger style anti-social behaviour occurring. Criteria like Secured by Design (where police officers vet architect's designs) co-opt architecture as a (supposedly) benign agent of law enforcement. In doing so they suggest that it's possible to design out crime. Instead of locating criminality within a socio-economic context measures like SBD blame it on recessed entrance ways and an overabundance of spaces for 'lurking'. Which also neatly aligns safety and security with conventional architectural styles - front doors to the street, low rise developments etc.

Isn't architecture then a pretty innocent victim in all this, forced to play the blame of villain for societies wider inequalities? A colonnade, for instance, is both a charming place for a pavement cafe or a lurkers paradise, depending on your location. The colonnades of Portland Place were, infamously, designed to eradicate the possibility of undesirables lurking in them. Which suggests that there is a certain causal relationship between architectural form and social behaviour, even if it might be overstated.

Architects, with their privileging of space (form) over taste (culture), unwittingly play themselves into a reactionary trap here. If places or buildings are perceived to have 'failed' it is because of their failings as architecture rather than the failings of the culture that inhabits them. Just as politicians deny the causal relationship between poverty and crime (because it is clearly convenient to do so), demonising any number of scapegoats (TV, drugs etc.) social inequalities become blamed on architecture.

Tschumi went on to say: "Murder in the street differs from murder in the cathedral". That would depend on whether you're the victim or not.

* This doesn't mean that it isn't viable otherwise, merely that it has been starved of the kind of upkeep that all buildings require.

Rough Poetry

Yesterday I had the opportunity to make a quick visit to Park Hill in Sheffield. Much has been written about this building lately and it was the subject of a recent BBC documentary following the story of its rebuilding by Urban Splash. I've been to Sheffield a few times and gazed up at its impressive bulk from the town below but I've never, somewhat shamefully, been up to look at it closely before.

Several things struck me when I did go and see it. The first is just how impressive a building it is. The concrete frame is indeed a beautiful thing - whether squinting or not - and its rhythm of single and double height openings has a tectonic vivaciousness which puts it way ahead of most comparable buildings of its period. Or any other period come to that.

Secondly, its extraordinary formal ruthlessness in maintaining a single roof datum while stepping down a steep hill throws up all sorts of vertiginously exciting spatial moments. I particularly like the way that its gargantuan scale at the bottom becomes almost intimate and traditional at the top of the hill. The concrete frame - a thing of stark abstract beauty when seen from afar - becomes a richly textured and endearingly rugged object close up.



One can see clearly how the twisting and turning plan form was intended to create partly enclosed public gardens between the blocks although these have an inevitably somewhat desolate quality today. The gaps between these areas, crossed by high level walkways, have an undeniable spatial thrill as the spaces tumble down the hill and the frame marches relentlessly on. Musically this building has been compared to the stark futurism of Sheffield's electronic pop, from Human League to warp, although looking at it now it seems to have more in common with the Krautrock of Can. Its relentless metronomic repetition and thumping low end register reveal subtle modulations the more you look at it, like staring into a very deep river.

Given all that the state of the place at the moment is deeply ambiguous. The decision to rip out not only the internal flats but the external brick and window infill panels might be justifiable on any number of less well realised housing schemes but seems particularly odd here. The different shades of stock brick give the block its distinctive Brutalist/Late Corbusien quality. Like Corbusier's Unite, the building offers an intruiging collision of machine like precision and cultivated rusticity.



Most odd of all though is the half-built half-demolished aspect of the building at present. With a bunch of earth movers - possibly pointlessly - moving muck around and the tallest section of concrete frame standing gaunt and exposed, it's possible to imagine that Park Hill is in the process of being built rather than re-built. In this state it has a bittersweet quality, both brave new world and failed vision of the future at one and the same time.

Not that this failure is necessarily a fault of the building iself. It seems, in principle, an eminently liveable place, a machine for living in the best possible sense. It's often said that buildings look best when still under construction. Certainly that's true when you see the exposed shuttered concrete bones of contemporary office buildings soon to be clad in jaunty, bar code facades. But Park Hill is heading the opposite way. Not for ever for sure, and hopefully not for that much longer, but its concrete frame whilst undeniably striking and strange with the sun shining through it ultimately looks a lot better with people living there.

Robin Hood Robin Hood, With Your Band of Men

Am I alone in being, at best, agnostic about Robin Hood Gardens and Building Design'scampaign to save it from demolition. A few things worry me about this campaign, some of which are:

1. I’m always suspicious when architects rally together. It always spells nepotistic self interest. Witness Denise Scott Brown (who I’m a big fan of otherwise) suggesting Robin Hood Gardens should be saved in order to initiate a reappraisal of the Smithson’s legacy. The canon of architecture and the Smithsons’ place within it are therefore more important than the residents who live there. Note to architects: it’s not always about you!

2. BD’s ‘statistics’ that residents want to keep the building are, if anything, even more unjustified and dubious than English Partnerships’ ‘statistics’ that those same residents want to demolish it. I can’t help but think that the resident’s genuine wishes are being manipulated by both sides.

3. Richard Rogers apparently objects to the over densification of EP’s proposals (do these exist? Are they real?) which is a bit steep coming from someone who has been preaching the gospel of inner city densification for the past decade.

4. Were the Smithsons actually that good? I know I know, I am a big fan of the Independent Group and the Smithsons definitely said some interesting things but the buildings? I’ve visited a few of them in my time, went to the exhibition of their work at the Design Museum and mostly they strike me as pretty strange rather than actually all that great.

5. Weren’t the Smithson’s and their generation quite against the preservation of old architecture for the sake of it? I’m not pro-demolition of anything, quite the opposite, but I find it a bit rich being lectured on conservation by tabula rasa Modernists.

6. The comparison of Robin Hood gardens with Bath’s Royal Crescent is bollocks.
Modern architects went through a phase of making comparisons to classical architecture, usually on the most spurious grounds. This has always seemed to me a particularly crass and pointless example of it.

7. What is being protected here? The failings of the architecture profession?

8. I’ve nothing against streets in the air. I live in a pre-fabricated block of flats with open deck access. It’s considerably less horrible than Robin Hood Gardens though.

9. Next door to Robin Hood Gardens is Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower. It’s better in every conceivable way.

10. I have never met anyone who isn’t an architect who likes it. Now, that could either mean than all my friends are philistines or that Robin Hood Gardens isn’t actually very nice.