Facing its imminent demolition, Robin Hood Gardens, the large-scale housing project by Alison and Peter Smithson asks for urgent attention. Our project proposes the radical repair of the building and tackles simultaneously the precarious situation of student housing in the UK.
The Studio explored the repair of Robin Hood Gardens, the Smithson’s 1972 social housing project in London. As demolition began, the studio took advantage of the suspended time in its destruction process to explore the future of one of the buildings. Still standing at the time, we were asked to think its repair as an act of radical resistance and explored both the repair of the building and the original social ambition of the project. In our current Anthropocene, repair includes questions of scarcity, sufficiency and longue durée and above all explores what it means to inhabit the world.
The project proposes repair as an act of radical resistance. Against standardised and dehumanising models, it makes a plea for an engaged way of intervening in the existing.
Robin Hood Gardens serves as a case study in order to explore the potential of post-war housing. Our intervention goes beyond a simple rehabilitation. It aims to give buildings the opportunity to evolve over time, while respecting its values. We believe in an architecture that considers history as a living material, placing users at the center and encouraging appropriation.
In London, the crisis of student housing is worrying. Privatization of the sector has led to a 67% rise in rents, forcing 1/5th of students to live in unhealthy and over-occupied conditions. This project proposes to rethink student housing through the very act of repair. It is guided by two key principles - adaptability and appropriation - and inspired by two references: the approach of John Habraken towards flexible housing and the work of Simone and Lucien Kroll in relation to experimentation.
Robin Hood Gardens is repaired without masking the traces of its time. A secondary steel structure supports the weaknesses of the primary structure. Each scar remains visible. Each intervention becomes identifiable. Repairing is revealing. But the project also faces the future and thinks long term. The steel structure creates flexible spaces, in which students can shape their own environments. Accommodations are modular and reconfigurable, turning individual modules into a collective space when needed. This system offers an infinite variety of uses exploring new forms of collectivity. In renewing the very typology of student housing, this project asks one simple question : how to repair the world together?d
