Unintentional Monumentality
by Eftychios Savvidis
The rather problematic -yet emblematic- Smithsonian ‘streets in the sky’,1 seems to have been proven insufficient, or better inefficient, in getting Robin Hood Gardens in the List, joining the ever growing fleet of English Heritage2. Instead, the provocative and influential public housing scheme, designed and completed in 1972 by two of Britain’s most important architectural designers and thinkers and also leading protagonists of the New Brutalism3, was given the title of the “monument” and offered a place in PastScapes– a repository / link in Historic England’s online presence for non-listed or non designated sites.4 The project that has since its realisation become evocative of what is now seen as a pivotal moment in British post-war architecture, signifying also “the progressive state of architectural design and public expectation at a time of change and social advance”5, as of August 2015, was granted a second certificate of immunity6, meaning that it cannot be considered again for listing until at least 2020. At the same time, the recent approval of the planning application7 for the second phase of the Blackwall Regeneration Project by the Tower Hamlets Council marked the end of a failed campaign to save the historic estate and gave a conclusion to this controversial conservation case8, condemning the concrete complex to demolition. Surprisingly, the only feature silently surviving as a reminder from a previous era, according to the redevelopment proposals, would be the grassed mound at the heart of the estate, which will not just be “preserved” and “retained in its entirety” but also “incorporated into the new landscape arrangements”.9
1 Coining the phrase to describe their programmatic plan of the stacked apartments and this particular system of circulation and flat access at every third level, the Smithsons termed one of the distinctive features of Robin Hood Gardens that would later be deemed by the listing authorities to have failed in its role of fostering a sense of community and its “malfunction” would ultimately mask the utopian ideals of social housing that the architects had originally set out to achieve. Park Hill in Sheffield (List entry number: 1246881), was upheld by Historic England as “a more significant example of deck access housing”, owing to its earlier date and greater extent, thus making the Robin Hood Gardens not considered as one of the best examples of its type, “not that innovative in its design” and certainly “not equivalent to the architectural achievement of other twentieth century estates which have been listed”. 2 According to Historic England nearly 400,000 historically important places are listed in England, up to this point. 3 New Brutalism, crystalized as a new chapter in the history of Modern English architecture, appeared to be one of the most important British contributions to world architecture of the twentieth century. 4 Robin Hood Gardens’ presence in the database of not-listed heritage sites is found in: http://www.pastscape.org.uk 5 Dickon Robinson, “Fit for Purpose” in Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, Twentieth Century Building Studies No.1, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.129 6 A certificate of immunity from listing was issued for Robin Hood Gardens in 2009 by DCMS on the advice of Historic England (then English Heritage). When the certificate expired in 2014, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets applied to Historic England for it to be renewed. 7 see Tower Hamlets Council online planning application documents [https://development.towerhamlets.gov.uk/online-applications/] 9 “The business of listing…” as Alan Powers, joint editor of the Twentieth Century Architecture journal, writes “…is often conducted with the exchange of few letters between conservationists and officials. Robin Hood Gardens was different, and no listing process has turned into such a media event.” [Alan Powers, Introduction, in Robin Hood Gardens: ReVisions, Twentieth Century Building Studies No.1, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.16] 9 from the official website of the redevelopment project’s architects: www.haworthtompkind.com/news
Ironically, the mound itself was formed after a similar historically poignant incident, where the Grosvenor buildings – a block of “model dwellings” built in 1892 – that stood in the site before, was decided to be demolished and replaced with new housing. The Smithsons, that were then commissioned by the LCC for the redevelopment project, retained the rubble from the 19th century structures and heaped it into a monumental pile covered with earth and grass, around which they would later assemble their incredibly sophisticated vocabulary of exposed concrete moulded into a new architectural language. Responding to the Council’s requirements for a site zoning 136 persons to the acre, and a solution of an ‘open-air deficiency’ in the area,10 while at the same time injecting the project with the preoccupations that guided their work throughout their career - which apart from concepts of community also included a “lifelong interest in the relationship between landscape and buildings, which they saw as a very unique and English contribution to the art of architecture”11 – the Smithsons looked to the eighteenth century practice of contrasting simple building forms with an artificially modelled landscape, and made their own version.12 The two twin but non-identical concrete slab blocks housing 213 families, shaped to the east and west site boundaries, were erected as if their sole role was to hug, protect13 and contain this topographically-morphed green neo-picturesque garden, created in the tradition of the crescents at Bath, Brighton and Nash’s Regent Park.14 The aerial colour photograph of Robin Hood Gardens published in Architectural Design that same year of its completion carried the text: “At the new city scale, making a garden should be like making a range of hills. Hills are a great formal idea, ever various, expressive of mood, expectant of weather […] fine silhouetted trees over 10 Alan Powers, A Critical Narrative in Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, Twentieth Century Building Studies No.1, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.28 11 Simon Smithson, We Called it Robin Hood Lane in Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, Twentieth Century Building Studies No.1, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.78 12 The intention to create a unity between buildings and landscape, following a theory of figure and ground, appeared to be influential in urbanism of that period and in which a strong formal relationship between positive and negative forms would allow the buildings to provide a frame for the landscape and each would acquire a distinctive character from this relationship (something that was often absent from the previous phase of modern planning). “What we tried to do at Robin Hood Gardens [was] to effect a lock between built-form and counter-part space; with the old trick towards this end of bent ground forms. It would seem as if a building today is only interesting if it is more than itself; if it charges the space around it with connective possibilities; especially if it does by a quietness that until now our sensibilities could not recognise as architecture at all…” stated Alison and Peter Smithson in their book Without Rhetoric, 1973. (p.36) 13 As the architects themselves admitted: “The theme of Robin Hood Gardens is protection. […] To achieve a calm centre, the pressures of the external are held off by the buildings and outworks. […] the inner facades overlooking the quiet of the protected garden.” (A + P Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London in The Charged Void: Architecture / Alison and Peter Smithson, The Monacceli Press, New York, 2001, p.296) The buildings for the Smithsons were acting as visual and acoustic barriers and their height was also studied so that they could allow more sun into the “sacred” garden. 14 Simon Smithson, We Called it Robin Hood Lane in Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, Twentieth Century Building Studies No.1, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.79
undulating fields and inviting scenes of woodland. […] another dimension entering our lives”.15 Focal point and main feature of this quiet introverted yet inviting oasis, or this “stress-free zone”16 that had the ability to host a calm island in this restless corner of London, as the Smithsons claimed, was always the big rounded grass hill moulded out of demolition spoil. This intentionally monumental, gorgeous and haunted space that in Peter Smithson’s words “[did] not look very large on the model, but is in fact two storeys high and it [would] be a surprising eminence…”17, evoked the idea of primitive pagan burial mounds and seemed to have been linked to ancient earthworks such as Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, an object of interest to the counterculture of the late 1960s. Praised as a strange and apparently unique feature of British architecture, the mound ‘starred’ in the Architecture Biennale of 2014, standing gracious in the middle of the main room of the British Pavilion in Venice, while referencing “thousands of years of British architecture, from ancient burial mounds to the rubble of demolished slums, sculpted into mounds as the central landscape feature of idealistic projects” as the curator of the British entry Sam Jacob was stating18. The major Biennale installation was not only a direct link to the circular mound of Robin Hood Gardens, but was actually made up of soil collected from that very same artificial hill. The seven-metre wide and one and a half metre tall earth mound, which visitors could climb via two sets of fluorescent pink stairs, was “representative of a certain kind of feature but it [was] also a provocation; it [was] also something which represents a burial - a kind of an end - but at the same time, the construction site – the place where things can begin. It [was] an incredible symbolic gesture, it [was] perhaps ‘unarchitecture’: a state either before or after architecture. It [had] some kind of destabilising quality.”19 Temporarily removed from its context, the mound was suddenly poetically seen as an artefact. A monumentalized object that was forced to reveal and project its content and inspire imagination. Surrounding it, a 360 panoramic narrative image, recounted and projected on the mound the story of British Modernism; from its mature flowering at the moment when it was at its most socially, politically and architecturally ambitious 15
The Architectural Design, vol.42, September 1972, Robin Hood Gardens, London E14, 1972, pp.561-562 as the Smithsons liked to call, that new essential, according to them, urban space within the larger fabric of the stressful London metropolis. “We have become in our bodies aware of the stress that urban noise and traffic movement induce, and realise that for the present our most important need is for quiet places. To achieve a calm pool in this particular place, we have played down the idea of ‘linkage’ […] in a sense we have replaced the image of the city in which connectedness was stressed, with one in which the survival of the ‘person’ and the ‘think’ within the everchanging communications net is held to be pre-eminent” [Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952-60 and their application in a building project 1963-70, p.194] 17 Peter Smithson, The Smithsons on Housing, BBC 2, directed by B.S. Johnson, 1970. 18 Sam Jacob (FAT Architecture) co-curated with Wouter Vanstiphout (Crimson Architectural Historians) 19 Sam Jacob, interviewed by James Taylor-Foster in June 2014 for archdaily.com 16
phase, but also at the moment that witnessed its collapse. In line with Rem Koolhaas’ theme for that year’s Biennale, ‘Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014’, the English curators with the project ‘A Clockwork Jerusalem’ described “a world where ruins could become utopias, where archaeology and futurism merged, the picturesque is reimagined as concrete geometry and where pop culture, history and social ambition were fused into new national futures”.20 Completely taken over by nature, densely inhabited by copses of trees, shrubs, wild flowers and overgrown grass, the mound that once reflected social visions and creative responses to housing, urban planning and new post-war futures, today stands between these soon-to-be-demolished and irreparably ran down concrete masses, crippling facades, broken windows and vandalized corridors. In all of its dilapidated and pleasantly wild state, more than ever, the mound appears as a magical object, as the weirdest memory device21, as the most unexpected lieu de mémoire22; allowing through its hybrid geology a digging in time as well as earth, down through meanings and associations, beyond loss and disaster, in search of the city’s subterranean veracity that touches upon recurring issues and patterns that trouble our times. Due to its proximity to Canary Wharf and the relentless march of development across London’s East End outwards, Robin Hood Gardens, a dissonance on the neoliberal landscape, appears to be squatting, both literally and figuratively, below the glinting towers of Britain’s newest financial centre, exemplifying at the same time, one of the most polarising disputes in contemporary architecture and urban planning. As the only by-chance-surviving23 feature of this estate that cannot be “allowed” to exist anymore, the mound, bearing in its guts repeated episodes of both destruction and preservation, today might actually represent the battlefield where the opposing forces of ‘heritage’ and ‘progress’ –each viewing themselves as light fighting darkness- compete and clash. Sole arbiter / referee of these battles and the only official regulator: the susceptible to political correctness an 20 “A clockwork Jerusalem” standing as a reference to both Kubrick’s film Clockwork Orange and William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, argued for today’s challenges in architecture and planning to be faced with the same imagination and ambition that has long characterised Britain’s attempts to build its New Jerusalems. [V. Richardson, S. Jacob, W. Vanstiphout, A Clockwork Jerusalem, British Council, UK, 2014] 21 Juhani Pallasmaa, Space, Place, Memory and Imagination: the temporal dimension of existential space (2007) in M. Treib, Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape”, NY Routledge, New York, 2009, p.190 Architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, claims that any human construction inhabiting our spatial and material reality could possibly serve as a significant ‘memory device’ in three different ways: first, it can materialize and preserve the course of time and make it visible maintaining the perception of temporal duration and depth; second, it can concretize remembrance by containing and projecting memories; and third, it can stimulate and inspire reminiscence and imagination. 22 Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire - Realms of Memory, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996–1998 23 It is unlikely that the redevelopment schemes ever intended to protect the mound as a monument, as a reminder of Robin Hood Gardens
always biased by popular prejudice, official inertia and vested interests ‘Listing Process’. As intervals between present and a preserved structure’s origin date have been steadily shirking24 and the ‘heritage boundary’ seems to be moving onwards in response to the passage of time, Listing, as the sole negotiator of contemporary urban palimpsests, appears in an erratic manner to be either approving demolition and regeneration or granting protection, allowing existence and naming / establishing monuments. Aloïs Riegl, that first challenged the ontological implication of the term; after concretizing the idea of the monument in its oldest and most original sense as “a human creation, erected for a specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events alive in the minds of future generations”25,noting that this definition was “too reductive”, he coined the concept of the unintentional monument. Brutally expanding back then, the term of the monument to incorporate every artefact without regards to its original significance and purpose, as long as it reveals a considerable period of time26, as long as it has the capacity of representing the process of development itself and as long as it holds a value for its beholder;27 in his classic 1903 analysis Der modern Denkmalkultus, he developed a thorough research for the value of monuments in the modern society and expressed a shift from the cult of the intentional monument to the cult of the unintentional monument, whose history and origin he traced back to the Italian Renaissance, with the first official measures for the preservation of certain buildings of the past, even though they had not been conceived as monuments when they were first built.28 At that very early point of the previous century, at the brim of modernism, Riegl started a discussion which in the years that followed, his successors29 either agreed with and built upon or opposed to or ignored. At the stake, there were always issues of importance or significance, evaluation; inherent or acquired spiritual qualities, embodied meanings, values attached, notions extracted, symbolising of ideas; mortality, memory and oblivion, historicity or synchronization; ethics and aesthetics; size, proportions, 24
Rem Koolhaas, Preservation is Overtaking Us, GSAPP Books, (2016), pp.13-16 Aloïs Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, Seine Entstehung (1903), translated by Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirado as The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin, Oppositions 25, Fall 1982, p.21 26 ibid p.24 27 ibid p.23 while the value of the intentional monument is always conditioned by its makers, the value of the unintentional monument is relative and, as Riegl points out, left to us to define: “when we call such works ‘monuments’ it is a subjective rather than an objective designation”. 28 ibid pp.24-31 Riegl argues that while the intentional monument appears as some trans-historical almost ubiquitous phenomena, the unintentional monument is a dateable invention of the West. 29 successors in the way of thinking, writing or treating issues concerning the notions of monuments and monumentality in general from Le Corbusier himself and Lewis Mumford to Sigfried Giedion and Louis Kahn or the Independent Group, to ICOMOS and the Conservation Charters, Pallasmaa or Nora. 25
massiveness, impressiveness, structural perfection; age, eternity, permanence or ephemerality; materiality or intangibility, protection, preservation or demolition… Challenging, questioning, opposing to, relocating, or enriching the notion of monumentality, each period redefined its present by redefining the monument. In the fragmented present, with the “dizzying acceleration of the velocity of time and the constant speeding up of our existential reality, seriously threatened by a general cultural amnesia”30, different objects and structures rise as monuments and are equally heralded under the banner of heritage; Under the fear of forgetting, everything becomes monumentalized, everything is potentially susceptible to preservation, everything appears fragile and worth protecting… And then the clash between cultural heritage and regeneration seems somehow inevitable… The march of preservation and monumentalization before reaching its repletion seems that it rather necessitates the development of a theory of its opposite: not what to keep, but what to give up… The monument needs for another time to be reconfigured and revisited. The monumentality once more to be redefined, and the relationship between ‘objects of celebration’ and subjects to be clarified. All, before taking the next step where these notions change once and for all: before memorializing as a function is replaced by the digital image and virtual reality, before digital archives take the role of storing memories from solid structures, before collective memory is diffused across an invisible electronic landscape rather than concentrated in singular objects, before preserving the database or the hard drive than the building. Before the migration of monumentality from the real to the image, from the material to the immaterial and ultimately into the digitizes computer bank or ‘the cloud’. The ‘streets in the sky’ might have failed giving ‘eternity’ to Robin Hood Gardens, but the mound will probably do so… The once grey ground that “nurtured the most weed-like of verdure and ultimately transformed into a new type of collective landscape” 31; rubble, this post-architectural matter, becoming a new type of authentic nature, ultimately fused and absorbed by geology32; never a subject of Listing, of preservation or monumentalization itself, managed to gain 30 Juhani Pallasmaa, Space, Place, Memory and Imagination: the temporal dimension of existential space (2007) in M. Treib, Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, NY Routledge, (2009), p.197 31 David Gissen, Débris in Subnature: Architecture’s other environments, Princeton Architectural Press, (2009), p.135 32 On the 1:50000 British Geological Survey Maps, the Robin Hood Gardens’ central mound, represented by a diagonal hatch running downwards from left to right, is identified as ‘Artificially Modified Ground’; and then further classified under the type of ‘Made Ground’. Not as a part of constructed landscape but as a geological layer itself, as part of the earth, as geology. [www.bgs.ac.uk/products/digitalmaps/digmapgb_art.html]
its permanence and grant its place in this demanding and fast-changing part of London. Back then, quite paradoxically, “rather than removing the image of debris from the city…”, a tactic that their precursors and most of their contemporaries would have proceeded to, following the mid-twentieth century’s aftermath of massive warfare and extended redevelopment demolitions that provided for their new national futures blank slates and sites obliterated of their pre modern histories, “the Smithsons, located it as a central aspect of modern urbanization”33. Intentionally giving it its monumental size, shape, proportions and presence, Alison and Peter Smithson could have never imagined that this exquisite feature four decades afterwards could possibly be unintentionally monumentalized. The sole evidence-to-be of their existence in that place, of their dreams and theories applied in space, but also of what existed even before them, and what will come after them; registering the flux of history or the flow of time in the best possible way, inspiring associations and interrelations, projecting epic narratives and prepared to absorb new ones, revealing time and repeated patterns34. As a reification of both demolition and preservation, end and beginning, of struggles of heritage over regeneration and of regeneration over heritage, appears as a micromonument that allows itself to be transformed and grown, adapted and altered, carefully negotiating the tension between permanence and transience, blurring the distinction between transitory and eternal… While Robin Hood Gardens will pass on to eternity as a digital ‘monument’ entry in a site on the web, the mound, as a part of the earth itself, will stand for everything that the actual building wasn’t allowed to stand for and certainly more than it was initially intended to stand for. Challenging at the same time the very idea of the monument, questioning the very sense of monumentality35 and proposing the existence of a series of micromonuments that alternatively (and unintentionally) rise and silently take over our cities… Was it always the real monument? The only feature/object ever needed to be actually saved?
33
David Gissen, Débris in Subnature: Architecture’s other environments, Princeton Arch Press,(2009), pp.135-137 two demolitions in less than half a century 35 and the processes that attribute monumentality 34
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Bibliography Books Gissen D., Débris in Subnature: Architecture’s other environments, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009 Koolhaas R., Preservation is Overtaking Us, GSAPP Books, 2016 Nora P., Les Lieux de Mémoire - Realms of Memory, Columbia University Press, 1996–1998 Powers A., ed. Robin Hood Gardens: Re-visions, Twentieth Century Building Studies No.1, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010 Richardson V, Jacob S., Vanstiphout W., A Clockwork Jerusalem, British Council, 2014 Riegl A., Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, Seine Entstehung, 1903, trslt. by Forster K & Ghirado D as The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin, Oppositions 25, 1982 Smithson, A+P, Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic 1955-1972, Latimer New Dimensions, 1973 Smithson, A+P, The Charged Void: Architecture, The Monacceli Press, 2001 Smithson, A+P, Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories and their application in a building project, Faber & Faber, 1970 Treib M., Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, NY Routledge, 2009 Articles Wigley M., The Architectural Cult of Synchronization, in October vol.94, The IG, MIT Press, 2000. pp31-61 Osborne J. F, Monuments and Monumentality, in Approaching Monumentality in Archaeology. ., SUNY Press, 2014. pp.1-19 Journals The Architectural Design, vol.42, September 1972, Robin Hood Gardens, London E14, 1972, pp.557-573 Audio-Visual The Smithsons on Housing, BBC 2, directed by B.S Johnson, screened 10 July 1970. Streets in the Sky, directed by Gilbert J., 15 October 2015 The Web https://www.pastscape.org.uk https://development.towerhamlets.gov.uk/online-applications https://www.haworthtompkind.com/news https://www.bgs.ac.uk https://archdaily.com
All images courtesy of the author.
Eftychios Savvidis, London 2017 savvidis.eftychios@gmail.com