Context

Infractus was a response to the high-profile campaign to save Robin Hood Gardens from demolition. An outline planning application submitted in January 2012 revealed the widescale Blackwall Reach Regeneration plan, replacing RHG’s 213 council flats with up to 1,575 less-spacious new homes and transferring much of the housing stock from public to private ownership.

RHG’s 213 flats were contained in two cranked ten- and seven-storey walls, which ran parallel to the A102 on its approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. The estate was an exemplar of New Brutalism, an aesthetic and architectural philosophy associated with socialist utopian ideologies, and was seen by many in the architectural community as one of the finest examples of twentiethcentury mass social housing. It was, however, considered by the council to be a flawed scheme, a reflection of misplaced utopian ambitions and compromised social ideals.

The Smithsons redesigned aspects of the traditional tower block, believing they could exploit the low cost and simplicity of mass-produced materials and pre-fabricated components to provide what they hoped would be a model for future living. The flats benefitted from innovative dual-aspect layouts that exceeded the Parker Morris mandatory space requirements of the time. To recreate the neighbourliness of terraced streets, they created elevated and wideaccess decks to enable street life and facilitate social encounters. The ideal ‘streets-in-the-sky’ concept was not achieved, however, with the decks being built narrower than planned due to budgetary constraints, which also blighted other aspects of the architectural vision.

13 Sketch by Peter Smithson, 1968. Dimensions for a group, illustrating early thinking for the organisation of the public housing estates. 14 (overleaf) Robin Hood Gardens, eastern wing. The two walls of housing are designed as defensive enclosures, acting as acoustic baffles to traffic noise and enveloping a communal green space. Originally conceived as a poetic abstraction of the English landscape, this green space featured two grassy hills, one large and one small, containing buried rubble from the demolished bombdamaged Victorian terraces on which they were built.

Indeed, RHG was branded a failure soon after its opening. The flats became depositories for the socially neglected. Overcrowded, vandalised by residents and deprived of attention by the council, the architecture soon degraded; progressive deterioration caused by pollution allowed steel reinforcing to rust through crumbling concrete, windows were smashed and burnt-out cars were dumped on the hill. Vandalism was seen as a key indicator of resident dissatisfaction with the living conditions.

After years of threats of demolition and subsequent campaigns for heritage listing by The Twentieth Century Society, Building Design magazine and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the architectural community rallied to offer testimony to RHG’s significance. Richard Rogers – who compared the estate to Bath’s Royal Crescent – described the scheme as Britain’s most important post-war social housing development, while Zaha Hadid declared it her favourite building in London.

As mentioned previously, our project responds to a significant moment in the estate’s fight for survival: Margaret Hodge’s decisive refusal to list the estate and suggestion that it could be digitally scanned instead. RHG was eventually demolished in 2019. Before this, however, and a year after A World of Fragile Parts, the V&A acquired a three-storey section of the garden and street-facing façade, including the complete repeating pattern of prefabricated concrete of a section of the ‘streets in the sky’ and two maisonette flats with their interior fittings. A section of the salvaged structure was then exhibited in Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin in Reverse at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in 2018, continuing the dialogue the V&A began with the estate when it commissioned Infractus. On this occasion, the structure was accompanied by Do Ho Suh’s digital scanning and photogrammetry, which allowed visitors to move along the walkways through the building, depicting and revealing individual lives in domestic interiors.

15 Signs of dereliction in the estate, some of which were captured in our scans.

16 A salvaged fragment of Robin Hood Gardens purchased by the V&A and exhibited at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition 2018.

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17 Doh Ho Suh’s commissioned film of the estate uses timelapse photography, 3D scanning and photogrammetry to move vertically and horizontally through the building.

18 The demolition of the estate from 2017 to 2019 was described as a failure by Historic England to not list significant examples of the UK post-war housing programme.