The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale — review

Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin in Reverse

Words by Johnny Tucker

Just as modern architecture died with the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe social housing development in St Louis, Missouri in 1975 (according to Charles Jencks), the post-war dream of quality social housing in Britain died with the start of demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in East London in 2017.

The dream was only barely alive at this point, having been dealt fatal blows by Margaret Thatcher’s council house shedding right-to-buy scheme and the neo-liberalism that followed, whereby this vital public-sector role was ever increasingly farmed out to the private sector.

Back in 1976, architects Alison and Peter Smithson were at the Venice Art Biennale exhibiting a bench based on one of the columns from the facade of their deeply idealistic and optimistic Robin Hood Gardens social housing project. At that time they wrote: ‘A building under assembly is a ruin in reverse.’ The exhibit also included a billboard-sized photograph of the recently completed Robin Hood Gardens that, nearly half a century on, is being demolished, finally laying to rest their utopian dream.

Now eight tonnes of its facade and staircase are on show in Venice at the Architecture Biennale, after being saved by the Victoria & Albert Museum for posterity (following some strong lobbying from Muf architecture/art).

This ‘ruin’ (installed by Arup) is part of an exhibition that also examines the ‘streets in the sky’ scheme via documentary photographs and footage, as well as interviews with supporters of, and those less avid about, the estate. It’s curated by Christopher Turner and Olivia Horsfall Turner and the aim is to provoke further debate about this particular scheme, its legacy, and the future of UK social housing.

The exhibition (designed by the design kollektiv) also features a stunning film installation by artist Do Ho Suh who has used 3D scanning and still and time-lapse photography to create a portrait of the building inside and out as well as of some of the people who lived there. Images and footage scroll vertically and horizontally over a cinematic screen and the effect is truly beguiling and also slightly surreal — as though you are looking at pans across a cut-away Wes Anderson film set.

If there’s one niggle, it has to be that although it is 9m high, the Robin Hood Gardens structure, just outside the show space, somehow feels a little lacking in presence — not quite as powerful a spectacle as you would have expected. The real thing strangely fails to express the building as well as Do Ho Suh does inside the exhibition.

This installation is fascinating, timely and thought-provoking, but, like a good deal of what goes on in Venice, it’s preaching to the converted. Then again what will it take, when even the horrific scenes of Grenfell Tower seemed to have failed to spark any meaningful debate, outside of the architectural community, on the role of the state in housing provision.

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3 of 5







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