CityLab: A Duplex of London's Public Housing Will Become a Museum Exhibit

Lovers of both social housing and 20th-century architecture have been fretting about the fate of East London’s Robin Hood Gardens for years. A public housing project and Brutalist icon completed in 1972, the estate (as projects are called in the U.K.) has been run-down and facing demolition for some time, targeted by a local borough that wants to replace it with denser, more profitable housing. [...]

It’s going to be scraped off the building’s carcass and preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Britain’s national art and design collection, where it will go on display in the public galleries (possibly in an East London branch that’s due to open in 2021). A remnant of Britain’s great 20th century social housing experiment will end up not as somewhere to live, but as a museum exhibit.

The move isn’t entirely unprecedented. The V&A, as the museum is known in London, already displays the carved wooden façade of a 1599 London merchant’s house. The symbolism is nonetheless striking. After decades of neglect, a building designed to give better conditions to low-income Londoners will be gutted, its concrete trimmings preserved as a design artifact. Free to admire for its clean lines and rough textures, the building will be presented for aesthetic enjoyment after having been safely gelded of its social purpose. Given the estate’s name and the general social profile of London museum-goers, it’s hard not to notice the irony: The building is being taken from the poor and given to the rich. [...]

That ethos is now as dead as any fossil. London’s housing projects are increasingly being redeveloped with more private housing, typically displacing many residents (despite prior assurances to the contrary) in the process. Robin Hood Gardens is being cleared away for a new development that could still rehouse the residents left on the estate after decades of tenancy attrition—even though boroughs across London have an appalling record at keeping promises to rehouse residents of redeveloped projects. Half of the new homes built on the site will be for private sale, with most of them costing over $700,000.

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