The Brutalist Playground

Architecture Gallery at RIBA, London
Until 16 August
Review by Cate St Hill

From the Balfron Tower and the Barbican, to Park Hill and Robin Hood Gardens, Britain's love-them-or-hate-them post-war housing estates are familiar to us all. A lesser-known aspect of their history though is their playgrounds - abstract and surreal designs, cast in sculptural concrete forms, that in the most part no longer exist. Deemed unsuitable for children's play, they were just another failure to add to brutalism's long list. Now, a new installation in the RIBA's Architecture Gallery by Turner Prize-nominated, architecture collective-of-the-moment Assemble, and artist Simon Terrill, aims to shed light on this overlooked and largely demolished slice of architectural history.

Now: The Brutalist Playground, at RIBA. Photo Credit: Photo by Tristan Fewings, Getty images for Riba

Assemble and Terrill trawled the RIBA's archive to create an immersive, pastel-shaded, foam landscape that draws inspiration from elements of three London estates: Churchill Gardens Estate in Pimlico (Powell and Moya), the Brunel Estate in Paddington (City of Westminster Architect's Department) and the Brownfield Estate in Poplar (the home of Erno Goldfinger's Balfron Tower).

A turquoise flying saucer from Churchill Gardens sharply inclines off the ground, while a thin wedge of a slide mimics the one at Balfron Tower, and honeycomb building blocks scatter across the floor. It all looks like hard colourful concrete, but The Brutalist Playground encourages audiences (adults and children alike) to scramble around on these soft surfaces and, well, simply, play. Other curators should take note - it's a welcome alternative to static displays and reproduced archival material.

It's certainly a new approach for the RIBA, one that was perhaps inspired by the success of the 1:1 installations at the Royal Academy's popular 2014 exhibition Sensing Spaces. 'I think that it's a way to shake up those who ascribe lots of importance to a theoretical or historical approach to architectural discourse,' says Assemble's Jane Hall.

Then: Playspace at Churchill Gardens Estate. Photo Credit: John Donat, Riba Library Photographs collection

It invites people to engage in a more intuitive, exploratory way, which for some could be quite challenging,' Her colleague, Joe Halligan, sees it as a more 'art-based approach' that raises questions, particularly about the value of these brutalist playgrounds in use today, rather than posing solutions.

Adds Hall: 'We would look at the photographs of these playgrounds and ask "How was someone supposed to play on that?". It's not prescribed, and that was the big unknown about this exhibition - how are people going to inhabit the space?'

With The Brutalist Playground, Assemble and Terrill are also commenting on the element of risk -- these concrete playspaces were conceived before liability and risk came to dominate our public spaces, and concrete could never be used for a playground today. The soft reconstituted foam makes these strange shapes seem even more surreal. Says Halligan: 'For me, one of the interesting things about these playgrounds is that they can be seen as "condensed brutalism" or something. It's a free architecture without constraints. You can see the fun that the architect was having making these amazing structures.'

Indeed, these brutalist playspaces can be seen as a symbol of the optimism in which these architects proposed to reconstruct the post-war city. They could teach us all to be a little bit more playful.