The demolition of state-built housing in the late 20^th century was symptomatic of a more general abandonment of the values of that century, a Dutch architect says.

Architect, planner, architectural theorist and writer Reinier de Graafhas released Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession a significant section of which is devoted to images of council estates being demolished which, for de Graf, is an indication of how society has changed and where it’s heading.

He grew up in a prefab concrete block and celebrates the often maligned council flats of Europe.

“There is a stigma attached to these kind of council estates and I never, growing up, thought it was an awful place. I remember it as a happy place and I’ve always been surprised at the stigma that is apparently attached to these places to the point that some of my writing has become a kind of celebrating of these places only as a way of disagreeing with a prevailing stigma which I think is wrong.”

These demolitions are a retreat from the notion that the state has a role in housing people, he says.

“The key substance of the 20^th Century is being blown up at a massive scale and I see that as a symptom that the values of the 20^th Century are being abandoned which I think is a very bad thing.

“I see the demolition of much of physical substance of the 20^th century as a symptom of a larger problem. You have to see those blocks in their time; they were big, brutal blocks, they were also a very impressive effort to give as many people an affordable home in the context of a housing shortage – and they did.”

Homelessness is now in crisis again, which is no surprise to de Graaf.

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