Nearly half a century ago, Robin Hood Gardens, a concrete housing project in east London, appeared to be the future of affordable urban living. In 1970, BBC TV featured the complex’s architects, Peter and Alison Smithson, in The Smithsons On Housing.

The married couple were much admired by contemporaries looking to break away from the clichés of the International Style; critic Reyner Banham praised their work in his 1955 essay The New Brutalism. In the BBC documentary, the Smithsons explain how Robin Hood Gardens, which welcomed its first tenants in 1972, would provide Londoners with a new type of living arrangement. “It will be, to outsiders, something they can immediately see as a new form,” Peter says. “And to the people who live in it, it offers a place with a special character which will release them and change them and be capable of being lived in generation after generation.”

....