ROBIN HOOD GARDENS

BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

01PQHPQ - HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE Eleni Liakoura - S275972

Prof. Filippo De Pieri Daniel Lozano - S276685
 THE QUESTION
Being one of the most controversial buildings of its decade, the Rob-
in Hood Gardens complex, by Alison and Peter Smithson, could be
considered one of the main instances for the British postmodern ar-
chitecture. A structure that intended to explore new ways of living,
yet was shadowed from the beginning by the vandalism and public
insecurity that crawled over the area.

Then, how was developed this path that leads to its demolition?

From this perspective, the objective is to chain our speech through

an analytical and chronological process: starting from the scale of
the City towards the scale of the Housing unit, simultaneously mov-
ing throughout the time. Thus, doing the recap of its history.
TABLE OF CONTENTES PAGE

1. Introduction. The City: the cultural effervescence. 4

1.1 The 1960’s - Swinging London. 4
1.2 The 1970’s Economic Recession. 4
1.3. The London East End Imaginary 4
1.4. The Public Housing Deficit 5
1.5 The gears in motion: Urban Rehabilitation for Poplar. 5

2. A new way of living 5

2.1 From Golden Lane to Team X: The Paradigm. 5
2.2 From the Urban Approximation to the Human Scale 6

3. Streets in the “shattered” sky 7

3.1 Architectural Outcome 7
3.2 Social Outcome 7

4. Sentenced to Demolition 8
4.1 The Controversy 8
4.2 Attraction for Concrete 9

5. Bibliographic References 10

During the 1960s, London underwent a
“metamorphosis from a gloomy, grimy
post-war capital into a bright,
shining epicentre of style”
Quote 1. Wakefield, Thirza. “10 films set in the
Swinging 60’s”. British Film Institute. (2014)
Figure 1. TIME cover magazine. Credit: Geoffrey
Dickinson (1966). ©TIME USA. All rights reserved.
ROBIN HOOD GARDENS: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 4
INTRODUCTION
THE CITY: CULTURAL EFFERVESCENCE
The time that Alison and Peter Smithson designed Robin Hood
Gardens was a really interesting period for London. There were
many new ideas and social changes in the way of living, together
with global issues that people were facing for the first time.
The 1960’s - Swinging London
The Swinging Sixties was a youth-driven cultural revolution that
took place in the United Kingdom during the mid-to-late 1960s,
emphasizing modernity and fun-loving hedonism, with Swinging
London as its centre. At the same time was taking place the political
activism of the anti-nuclear movement and sexual liberation together
with the post-World War II economic expansion. [Quote 1] We could
say that ‘60s was for London the time of a cultural revolution as far
as art, music, fashion, radio and cinema are concerned. [Figure 1]
As we could imagine neither architecture could be unaffected by all
this progress.
The 1970’s Economic Recession
After the ‘60s that was, indeed, a flourishing decade, an economic
recession came up. Actually, it was a period of economic stagnation
in much of the Western World putting an end to the overall Post-
World War II economic expansion. It differed from many previous
recessions by being a stagflation, where high unemployment and
high inflation existed simultaneously. This was a phenomenon that
people never had faced before, neither in the United Kingdom nor in
any part of the Western World. The United Kingdom was affected
by this phenomenon for about 2 years (1973-1975). One of the
most important factors that led the U.K. to such a downturn was
the oil crisis, although the real one came in the form of the Three-
Day Week, which was the result of fears over power shortages as a
miner’s strike was announced in December 1973.
The London East End Imaginary
Robin Hood Gardens is situated in the Docklands of East London, in
the council of Tower-Hamlets. It is just north of the River Thames,
providing a viable source of labour and commerce that time,

although, it is important to keep in mind that the two architects
were thinking on another way about the places near the river. The
docks were initially developed at the end of the 17th century and
grew to be the largest in the world during the 19th century. In 1802,
the East India Dock Company began selling off parcels of land to be
developed into high-density, low-cost housing for workers on the
docks. By 1870, the area was considered a slum. Tower-Hamlets
council has since tried multiple times to gentrify the area in an
attempt to reduce crime and improve living conditions. In 1980 -
eight years after the opening of Robin Hood Gardens- the British
government began closing the docks in East London and adopted
various policies to stimulate new development.
The Public Housing Deficit
After World War II there was noticed a crucial need for public
housing. In reality, Great Britain had already an important tradition
in public housing. To be more precise, Social housing in Britain
began as early as the 10th century. It wasn’t until the early 20th
century when the government councils began collecting taxes to
build housing specifically for lower-income families, which are now
known as council homes or council flats. The need for housing at the
end of World War I and later the Housing Act of 1930 created more
opportunities for council homes to be constructed. After four million
homes were lost in World War II, Britain began building more council
homes than ever before. The need for housing in the late 1960s
was so great that the in-house architects of local councils could
not keep up with the demand. By 1961, there were over 52,000
people on the waiting list for housing in London. The London County
Council, which was overseeing the construction of council homes,
began to outsource the design to private architects, opening up
new opportunities to explore the role of social housing. The London
County Council created a short-list of qualified architects and held a
competition for three new developments. Alison and Peter Smithson
were among those selected to design one of the developments.
The Gears in motion: Urban Rehabilitation for Poplar
The project is located on Robin Hood Lane, a medieval road whose
name is a corruption of the original name of Robin Wood Lane. The
road was an essential connection for the working class who lived in
this region throughout the 19th and 20th centuries while working
on the docks. This fact employed the Smithsons as far as their
design is concerned. Their main vision was to have a good impact
on the urban space together with the promotion of “good-living”
conditions for people in need. Undeniable is their concern about the
production of a healthy environment next to the river, where people
would be able to walk, relax, get some rest or even eat an ice-cream.
We should not forget that Robin Hood Gardens was a field really
close to the river. That was a fact that put them in thought about
the relation of the building that they designed, the nowadays reality
and the reality of the future.
ROBIN HOOD GARDENS: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 5
A NEW WAY OF LIVING
From Golden Lane to Team X: The Paradigm
The New Brutalism is “an ethic, not an aesthetic”(Banham, 1966,
pg. 10). It is not the same as Neo-Brutalist since this is a stylistic
label, just as “neo-Classic or neo-Gothic”(Banham,1966, pg 10).
New-brutalism is, we would say, an attitude not only in architecture
but also in a way of living. It was the first time in history that young
architects felt the need to express something so new that there was
no other architecture to be used.
New Brutalism was brought to England when Alison and Peter
Smithson started their career. They were undoubtedly its most
passionate exponents at that time in London, being even the
designers of the Miesian Smithdon High School at Hunstanton,
Norfolk, which is generally referred as the first ‘Brutalist’ building.
A term stuck to them for two interesting reasons: in first place
because they were ready to take into consideration this attitude
seriously and feel each and every single point of it, and secondly due
to Peter Smithson was known to his friends during his student days
as “Brutus”, a nickname based probably on physical similarities with
the Roman hero.
The couple argued that the new forms of production, consumption,
transportation and life demanded a new form of living. They
understood the city as a structure of human associations and
wanted to address this idea in the housing field. The building that
Alison and Peter Smithson based their ideas in order to create
Robin Hood Gardens was their proposal for the 1952 Golden Lane
Competition. It was the first time they tried to apply strategies
and ideologies that their “mentor” –Le Corbusier- had taught to
them, and at the same time, they made an effort to correct the
“mistakes” that their professor made. One of the most important
characteristics of that proposal was “streets-in-the-sky”. Inspired
by the Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, which shaped
interior corridors without natural light to access the housing units,
the Smithson decided to propose a system of lateral open-air decks
disposed to host the entrances of the apartments garnished with
pots with flowers, children playing and most notably, the interaction
between neighbours.
Although the forms of the housing units of the Golden Lane Project
owed much to Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation and its internal
street, the more radical part of the project was the de-emphasis
of the building as a discreet unit of urbanization, and instead, the
development of a network of continuous buildings arranged in a kind
of cellular or synaptic pattern [Figure 2]. Such a network would
respond to local needs and topography and would exist as another
layer of urbanism upon the existing city fabric. This clustered and
networked approach, a flexible system, was a rejection of the

Figure 2. Allison and Peter Smithson. Golden Lane
project, network housing and streets in the air (1952).
Smithson Family Collection.
imposition of the a priori high modernist grid. The project was
presented at CIAM IX, a definitive moment to be considered as
founders and influential members of Team X in the upcoming years.
From the Urban Approximation to the Human Scale
Alison and Peter Smithson confronted every architectural decision
as a way to express their ideas related to a new way of living. This
concept influenced drastically their way to approach the design,
starting from the urban scale up to the human scale.
To begin with, they cared a lot about the noise and the strategies
that they would apply in order to reduce it. The flats are divided
into two large housing blocks that enclose a central green space
[Figure 3]. This central space acts as the core of social life for the
children of the estate. A large mound was constructed in the middle
of the place, containing the remains of the demolished buildings
previously existent on the site. The mound was conceived in order to
prevent people from playing football and making noise.
The next decision has to do with the concrete acoustic wall around
the plot. It was designed mainly as a barrier to the noise that came
from the highways around the buildings. In order to prevent it
from looking like a prison, they created angled gaps between the
concrete panels. The gaps are shaped in a way that people can
have brief glances to the inner side while they walk along the wall,
whilst preventing that direct pass of noise. As additional support
for the acoustic barrier, there was a “green line” composed of trees
aligned to make the façade more beautiful and help to break the
sound produced by traffic. Another important detail about the noise
protection refers to the façade, which is given projecting concrete
mullions shaped as I-beams, working as a final strategy to prevent
the noise of the cars from travelling along the surface of the façade,
reducing in that way the levels of noise to reasonable values. The
same thing happened with the façade windows thanks to their
ROBIN HOOD GARDENS: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 6
opening system since they kept enough gaps to let the air pass from
the top, and at the same time preventing the influx of direct noise
at the bottom.
The next choice has to do with the interior layout of the floorplan
and the appliance of the rule “the noisy next to the noisy” [BBC,
1970, 8:15]. The noisy rooms, that is to say, the living rooms and
common zones were placed on the street’s side while the bedrooms
were located on the side towards the stress-free zone. “The kitchens
are so planned that a mother can keep an eye on the little children
playing out on the decks and also from time to time look down on the
other side where the older children are playing” [BBC, 1970, 8:55],
in the stress-free zone.
Their “street-in-the-sky” concept was to build housing as a series
of slab decks, with an exterior widened deck at every third level.
This was mainly a social decision more than an architectural one.
This place was for them the representation of the “old street”. To be
more precise, they used to imagine it as a neighbourhood’s street
before the car’s invention, where people meet each other, exchange
“good morning’s”, put their pots, let their children play without the
fear of cars.
Furthermore, there were some other details that illustrated the
sensitiveness of the Smithson. For instance, the entrance for each
apartment was placed in a nook of the wall, and the door was set
perpendicular to the walkways. That provided an element of privacy
and also encouraged people to put beautiful pots and flowers out of
their doors or any other thing that they probably needed. Moreover,
the walkways’ rails were fitted with glass panels to allow more
natural light to enter into the apartments.
Figure 3. Allison and Peter Smithson - Robin Hood
Gardens. Site plan with scheme of the internal space
(1968). Smithson Family Collection

As far as the probable violent behaviour of people on the building
is concerned, the two architects had a really realistic sense about
the place that they built and the people for which they built. The
buildings were built out of in-situ concrete, a robust building method
to withstand the demands of the building’s lower-class occupants. It
was thought that by using heavy building materials, the lower-class
and often criminal tenants would be less able to cause detrimental
damage to the structure.
All this social thought behind this building is probably incompressible
for a nowadays architect’s logic. In some cases, architects tend to
ignore the political and social dimensions of their work, although,
even if they take those into consideration, the results cannot be
absolutely predicted. No matter how talented or positive can be
the decisions of the architect, in practice, the real situation and,
of course, the situation after some years from the construction,
tends to be an uncontrolled and unexpected territory. This fact has
to do with both the users and the community in which the building
is immersed.
STREETS IN THE “SHATTERED” SKY
The Architectural Outcome
The construction of the Robin Hood Gardens was completed in
1972, and henceforth the new residents were prepared to enjoy
and experience all the diversity of spaces that the architects had
dreamt of. Nevertheless, the reality tends to by a little more tricky
than expected, especially when is about to human behaviour and
living space. The theory now becomes a physical fact where every
decision made during the design process has an important effect in
how the people appropriate and take care of it, and that was not an
exception for the Robin Hood Gardens context.
As we could understand during the previous chapters, the project was
the physical representation of Smithson’s theoretical approaches to
housing and its relationship with the way of living in a postmodern
society. Their proposal for the Golden Lane Competition, in 1952,
was apparently the prototype of it, but in the end, the resultant
product was slightly different from that.
From the urban scale, it is pretty clear that their intentions for
the contest were totally modified this time by “ the acceptance of
context as a leading element in architectural design, specifically
on a morphological and spatial level” [Morel, 2012, pg. 06].
The relationship between the two parallel housing blocks, the
surrounding highways and the inner forecourt blurred the idea of
configuring an overlapped urban fabric for pedestrian displacement
with the buildings, as was proposed for Golden Lane. The complex,
ROBIN HOOD GARDENS: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 7
doubt to its internal configuration, resembled even a traditional
courtyard housing block, a fact that emphases further their concern
for retrieving the importance of the historical context during the
development of a project. The urban outcome suggests that locally
the project looked for a very respectful and very well adapted
position in the plot, where its inhabitants could feel embraced,
rather than a fragmentary one.
Nevertheless, as we go deeper into the inner distribution and how
space could be experienced by the final users, some contradictions
begin to appear, from which are worth to mention four specific
points: In the first place, the access to the buildings was developed
through four pretty narrow passages located in the corners of the
plot, unconnected from the inner courtyard. This situation isolated
the park throughout the approximation process, turning it into a
space used only for whom that pretends to access directly to it and,
worst still, to look at it through the rooms and kitchen windows.
That is to say, the park became more a residual space rather
than a strategic one. Secondly, the proportions and conditions of
the vertical circulation system left much to be desired. The entry
carried out by single-blind doors, its tight hallways and the lack of
natural lighting, made it resemble more an emergency stair system
instead of a space with the dimensions and hierarchy necessary for
its adequate functioning, a gesture that was weakly expressed in
the façade by the architects.
Thirdly, the pursuit of achieving an aesthetic and an image clearly
recognisable in the façade obtained a contrary effect from what
they were looking for, a sense of alienation and disconnection
was generated between the neighbours, the context and their
own apartments. The rhythm and materiality selected hid and
homogenized the various functions that laid behind it, blurring this
way the human scale from an urban perception. And last but not
least, the “streets-in-the-sky” scheme, one of the main features
in the Smithson’s housing theory, was not totally understood by
the tenants. An insufficient width and the lack of alternative uses
apart from housing (strong attribute for their Golden Lane proposal,
which moreover represents properly the actual street life on ground
level) made those streets, a space barely used as a circulation area
instead of a place for interaction and leisure. The absence of the
heterogeneity of values, spaces and uses distinctive of a city and
consecutively represented at the neighbourhood scale, sentenced
the project to a state of drabness.
The Social Outcome
Certainly, the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate was built
with noticeable conception problems and misunderstandings,
yet we could not assert that the project was a failure because of
those circumstances only. What we do know is that the building
was erected among a territory with very complex social issues, a

Figure 4. The use of space as a social portrait. Photograph taken by
Ioana Marinescu (1968).
situation that was tightened by a sum of two, and possibly more,
unfortunate events, persuading negatively the image of the housing
estate towards the population and public institutions.
Poplar was already well known as a high-density dwelling borough
for decades, inhabited by middle-class families, especially
immigrants, and considerably affected by high poverty and crimes
rates. Robin Hood Gardens was planned as one of the various
attempts for rearranging the diverse social dynamics of the region
with new social housing developments; nevertheless, the building
was eventually consumed by it [Figure 4]. Only a year after its
construction, it was already vandalised. Very seldom strategies to
control and mitigate the situation were applied, and, together with
dark and narrow common spaces, doomed the inhabitants upon
the turmoil of lack of preventive maintenance and social disorder.
This is a phenomenon that could be possibly addressed through the
“broken windows theory”, proposed by James Q. Wilson and George
L. Kelling in 1982.
According to broken windows theory, neighbourhood physical
and social disorder causes residents to be fearful and retreat from
their neighbourhoods. This breaks down informal social control
mechanisms and suggests to residents and outsiders alike that
the neighbourhood is “uncontrolled and uncontrollable”, which
ultimately may lead to more serious crime. The idea is that
disorder causes fear, and fear leads to activities that cause
serious crime. [Chappell, 2011, pg. 522]
Based on this statement, one could suggest that there is a strong
relationship between the sense of security and the quality and
constant restoration of the buildings, since we must consider
that “(...) dilapidated neighbourhood conditions likely affect social
relationships with those in the neighbourhood” [Chappell, 2011, pg.
526]. Thus the appropriation of the dwellers for the neighbourhood
itself and the sense of security of its surrounding inhabitants, being
ROBIN HOOD GARDENS: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 8
in this case, the social-housing complex Robin Hood Gardens, was
pretty depressed.
Sadly, all these different conditions around it lead us to contemplate
that awful management, half-baked spaces for social interaction
and degraded social context sentenced the building apparently
towards a single faith.
SENTENCED TO DEMOLITION
The Controversy
The years passed, and the social conditions around the building
existence continued with the same levels since its construction:
a community principally composed by working-class families and
immigrants, overcrowded and barely taken into consideration by the
public institutions. Furthermore, the British state has maintained
over the past decades the implementation of different strategies
of urban regeneration in the area, as the creation of the financial
district of Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome on the other side
of the river. Such instances illustrate how, on one side, the imaginary
in which Robin Hood Gardens was immersed in contemporary times
poses a tendency to establish a new type of architecture as formal
identity. On the other side, the pressure for the real-state on the
London East End was increased considerably, especially when the
politics for public housing contemplate now the idea of “affordable
housing” instead of “social housing”, inferring from its direct
meaning the change of scope concerning the housing deficit in the
region.
In the middle of this context, Robin Hood Gardens was ‘assimilated’
by a great project of urban redevelopment named “The Blackwall
Reach Regeneration Project”, being the year 2007 crucial for
its future. A series of surveys made by the tenants led to the

‘convenient’ conclusion that it would be demolished in the upcoming
years. The new project objective is to replace the existing 214 low-
density estates for 1475 new apartments, including a mosque and
new green areas and public spaces for the neighbourhood.
The attention of the media was promptly attracted, and a relentless
campaign towards the possibility of preserving the building and
enlisting it as architectural heritage was organized, including
architects of the standing of Sir Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid
and even Simon Smithson, son of the architects designers of the
estate. The journal BDOnline and other organizations focused on
the protection and preservation of the modern building heritage
and social housing, as Twentieth Century Society, attached as well.
Nevertheless, all their effort was all in vain. The two attempts to
enlist the building as architectural heritage were unsuccessful, the
first made in 2008 and the second the next year, in 2009. Tower
Hamlets gave their approval for the demolition in 2012 and then, it
started the next year. Eight years later, despite all the controversy
and discussion around the concept of brutalism as part of the British
more interesting ideas for the postmodern era, the west 7-stories
building has been demolished and now the taller, the eastern bloc,
which is fully inhabited by the date, awaits its demolition this year,
2020.
Attraction for Concrete
The imminent demolition of Robin Hood Gardens has brought
forth the discussion regarding two but not so close topics related
to the future of the social housing estates in the contemporary
and globalized world. At one end, it is the idea of the building as
a representation of the legacy of a couple of renowned architects,
an icon and a plastic/aesthetic fact in the history of architecture,
rejecting indirectly the social background and reality that was
embodied in it. Is this the case that for the 2018 Venice Architecture
Biennale, the Victoria and Albert museum retrieved a small part of
the demolished building to be re-built and installed as a permanent
exhibition piece. This infers that “Robin Hood Gardens, or a reified
chunk of it, is to be celebrated and preserved as an artefact of
aesthetic contemplation in the very same moment that it is vilified
and destroyed as social housing” [Thoburn, 2018, pg. 620]. Thus
Figure 5. Jessie Brennan. A Fall of Ordinariness and Light (The
Justification). (2016)
ROBIN HOOD GARDENS: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 9
the building ‘transcends’ its social and political significances, its
demolition crisis in the present, and becomes part of the mass
consumption as a museum product validated as art [Figure 5].
On the other hand, the Robin Hood Garden case illustrates an
even bigger underlying problem: the eviction of the working-class
population from inner London with the kind of schemes that the
Blackwall Reach Regeneration represents. The brutalist legacy
in the UK has been affected by the urban redevelopment policies,
where those buildings, the so-called “concrete monstrosities”, has
been given to private offerings, as the case of the Balfron Tower,
shaping a new way of urban gentrification. Falling that, the other
option is to being wiped out, as happened with Robin Hood Gardens.
All the system is supported on the idea that there is a great deficit
of housing in the region. But we have to consider this:
London’s crisis of housing affordability is created in large
measure by the demolition of its council estates. The cleared
land is invariably turned over to the private sector for capital
investment and speculation, with the vast majority of the new
housing stock for rent and sale at much-inflated prices, or
for asset accumulation as empty property. This is the process
known by the dissimulating term ‘regeneration’ [Thoburn, 2018,
pg. 614].
In the end, one can conclude that the final destiny of Robin
Hood Gardens was unabashedly masked with a problematic of
architectural and social difficulties, which the tenants never were
eager to respond and solve, to hide the economic interests that
were the priority rather than is protection as a cultural legacy.
The Smithson’s project, despite its internal circumstances, it was
conceived to represent the idea of dignified working-class housing
in an era of social and economic depredation at this. It deserved
better stewardship during its functional period, and now, with the
high environmental costs that imply to fulfil its demolition, it was
more suitable to consider its refurbishment taking into account the
global scenario of environmental and energy issues in which we are.
 ROBIN HOOD GARDENS: BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 10

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

BOOKS PAPERS
• Banham, Reyner. New Brutalism: Ethic or aesthetic. London: • Cruz, Leandro de Souza, “Arquitetura Brutalista e Habitação
Architectural Press, 1996 Social: Reflexões a partir do Robin Hood Gardens (Inglaterra).”
• Hall, Peter, Colin Ward. Sociable Cities: The legacy of Ebenezer In: X Seminario Docomomo Brasil. Curitiba 2013.
Howard. Chichester: Wiley, 1998. • Morel, Frank. “Abstraction of a concept: a reflection on the
• Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Robin Hood Gardens.” June 12, 2012.
Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2013. https://www.academia.edu/17030294/Abstraction_
• Johnston, Pamela, Rosa Ainley, and Clare Barrett. Architecture of_a_concept_a_reflection_on_the_Robin_Hood_
is Not Made with the Brain: The Labour of Alison and Peter Gardens?source=swp_share
Smithson. London: Architectural Association Publications,
2005. THESIS
• Powers, Alan. Robin Hood Gardens Re-visions. London: Twentieth • Kasimidi, Marianela. “Robin Hood Gardens. The past, present
Century Society, 2010. and future of a much debated housing state.” History Thesis,
• Risselada, Max and Dirk van den Heuvel, Team 10, 1953-81: In TU Delft, 2013
Search of a Utopia of the Present. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
2005. WEBSITE CONTENT
• Johnson, Bryan Stanley. “The Smithsons on Housing.” Filmed
JOURNAL ARTICLES 1970 at BBC, London, UK. Video, 28:18.
• Chappell, Allison, Elizabeth Monk-Turner & Brian K. Payne. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/83BR6Jk2wK8
“Broken Windows or Window Breakers: The Influence of Physical • Gilbert, Joe. “Streets in the sky”. Filmed and produced by himself
and Social Disorder on Quality of Life”. Justice Quarterly 28, 3 in 2015. London, UK. Video, 6:54.
(2011): 522-540. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/142528155
• Cunha Borges, João, Teresa Marat-Mendes. “Walking on
streets-in-the-sky: structures for democratic cities.” Journal of
Aesthetics & Culture 11, 1 (2019)
• Eisenman, Peter. “From Golden Lane to Robin Hood Gardens; or
if you follow the Yellow Brick Road, it may not lead to Golden
Green.” Oppositions 1, 1 (1973)
• Heuvel, Dirk van den. “Between Brutalists. The Banham
Hypothesis and the Smithsons way of Life” The Journal of
Architecture 20, 2 (2015): 293-308.
• Heuvel, Dirk van den. “Robin Hood 2001: Kolonisering van het
moderne / Robin Hood 2001: The colonisation of the modern.”
OASE 51 (2001): 96-103.
• Hopkins, Owen. “Architecture and the Paradox of Freedom”.
Architectural Design 88, 3 (2018): 6-15.
• Thoburn, Nicholas. “Concrete and council housing: The class
architecture of Brutalism ‘as found’ at Robin Hood Gardens”.
City 22, 5-6 (2018): 612-632

NEWS ARTICLES
• Forty, Adrian. “‘Concrete? It’s communist’: the rise and fall of the
utopian socialist material”. The Guardian, February 27, 2019.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/27/concret-
its-communist-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-utopian-socialist-
material