Date: 26 June 08
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Kraft Architecture working with Mike Hyatt Landscape Architects has been shortlisted for the 'Save Robin Hood Gardens' Competition sponsored by Building Design Magazine.
The competition is part of an ongoing campaign by BD Magazine to save the landmark Robin Hood Gardens Estate designed Alison + Peter Smithson.
The regeneration masterplan by the young Glasgow based practice involved introducing a greater variety of commercial & arts based mixed-use development to provide better employment opportunity and encourage diversification.
The proposals exploit existing and potential new levels across the site to create a continuous landscape that visually connects the whole area to the wider urban fabric. The 'blanket' surface sympathetically incorporates the striking original landscape features of the Smithson's original proposals.
The introduction of a wider range of social activity and community support facilities illustrate how this run down area of London could become a dynamic place without losing its distinctive character and historic urban grain. Details of how the existing homes might be sympathetically upgraded were explored through the use of sensitive and sustainable extension and renovation proposals.
About Kraft Architecture
Kraft Architecture, established by Bruce Newlands in 2007, is a small creative collective studio based in Glasgow, and specialises in innovative design solutions for the built environment.
Kraft includes a collective of individual talents who work in collaboration & through joint ventures & flexible working practices. This modus operandi ensures that the Kraft team is flexible + adaptable, being able to bring in specialist knowledge and adequate resource for particular projects.
The practice collaborates with architectural firms, landscape architects, artists, services engineers, model makers, illustrators & industrial designers in the belief that the process of design is an integrated one and works best when involving the widest range of people at all levels.
About Robin Hood Gardens
Robin Hood Gardens was designed in the late 1960s by architects, Alison and Peter Smithson. Completed in the 1972, the housing complex in Poplar, east London, drew on the idea of “streets in the sky”, and was inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation apartments in Marseille, France. The Smithson building consists of two long blocks, one of ten stories and the other of seven, built from pre-cast concrete slabs and containing 213 flats, surrounding a landscaped green.
Robin Hood Gardens (RHG), which has been described as a seminal example of post-war social housing design, is currently being considered for demolition and redevelopment, in order to accommodate increased numbers of homes on the site. It is currently being considered for listing: an announcement on this is pending.
BD’s campaign to have the Smithsons’ building listed has attracted more than 2,000 signatures.
The competition organisers believe that RHG is an exceptional work of architecture that achieves good space standards in its flats and a large amount of open space. It offers much-needed family- sized units to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Demolition would also entail a high loss of embodied energy. All reasonable options for retaining it, while allowing for further development, should be explored.
The organisers also recognise that RHG has flaws as a place to live. Experience on other estates of its generation has shown that such flaws can be addressed without wholesale demolition. There is, however, a real need for change.
The purpose of this International Ideas Competition, which was open and anonymous, was to invite and generate proposals that show how the site can change and be intensified, without destruction of the existing buildings or loss of the site’s essential qualities. These proposals will inform and influence the ongoing debate about RHG in particular, and the wider debate about the retention and transformation of buildings of its generation.
Qualified architects were invited to submit proposals that show how the site can be renewed and transformed while retaining the best of the existing. The winner and finalists will be chosen by a jury of leading architects and other architectural figures, and will be published in a special feature in Building Design magazine.
The Competition
The purpose of the competition is to propose a viable and creative solution in response to the option of retaining Robin Hood Gardens. The proposal should propose imaginative approaches to saving and transforming this existing 70s icon. The competition entries need to show how Robin Hood Gardens (RHG) can be modified, and include an amenity strategy to keep the existing open space - one of the unique features of the estate.
The competition will also establish that retention of the estate is a greener option than demolition, and hopes to influence the listing process which is current. The success of the competition will be the mix of the creativity of the idea with the reality of this wider political context.
-To read the competition Brief in fill click on the following link (PDF | Size: 2.80mb)
-To view Kraft Architecture's shortlisted project in detail click on the following link (PDF | Size: 3.85mb
-To view the competition results click on the following BD link
