Architexturez-IN wrote:

The heritage minister, Margaret Hodge, must decide next week on the fate
of a twin-slab estate of flats in east London called Robin Hood Gardens.
It is grimly sandwiched between a main road and the approach to the
Blackwall tunnel and has an ironic title. Never have the rich been
robbed to dump so much concrete ugliness on the heads of the poor. The
tenants and Tower Hamlets council want the place down, and now.

Tower Hamlets Council, which owns the estate, together with English Partnerships, propose to demolish the estate to make way for 3,000 new homes. This is on the grounds that not only are the Smithsons-designed blocks past saving, but residents also voted for demolition, although refurbishment has since been costed as the cheaper option. 

Zoran Radivojevic’s winning scheme in our ideas competition shows how the buildings’ powerful urban form can easily withstand some quite radical intervention. And this idea — that the buildings can act as a fulcrum for further development — was a theme that ran through a number of the entries. 

But the contest raised other issues, namely that 20th century buildings are far more capable of sustaining radical intervention than those of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

While many of the architects treated the two blocks with reverence, the more successful entries in the judges’ view were less nervous about cutting through the blocks to make them more permeable, or hanging additional structure off the facades to animate them and make the occupancy of the blocks more readable. 

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One of the most obvious problems of the existing blocks is the failure of the Smithsons’ “streets in the sky”. The balconies are too narrow, and a number of entries proposed making them wider and greener — more hedges than streets. 

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