Colin Davies appraises two new surveys of contemporary life within notable housing schemes that have been both revered and reviled
‘Modernist Estates Europe: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them Today’
Stefi Orazi
White Lion Publishing, 192pp, £30
‘The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead’
Eds Peter Chadwick and Ben Weaver
Here Press, 188pp, £29
For most people in Western Europe, the modernist housing estates of the twentieth century represent an unfortunate episode in architectural history that was soon brought to an end by a change of paradigm and widespread demolition. Concrete high-rise novelty gave way to low-rise brick normality. Of course, ‘most people’ doesn’t generally include architects, who continue to stick up for, and be inspired by, the work of their pre- and post-war modernist forebears. Joining the architects, there is a certain demographic of culturally aware middle-class professionals who also like modernist housing. Some are even prepared to buy, and live in, surviving examples of it. There is an overlap, perhaps, with the youngish people who keep the shelves of art gallery shops filled with books about Brutalism.
‘Modernist Estates Europe’ is designed to appeal to these sophisticated modernism-lovers and anyone else who might possibly be converted to the cause. Fifteen estates are studied, some of them canonical works in the history of architecture, such as Le Corbusier’s Marseilles Unite, Siedlung Halen in Bern by Atelier 5, and Gallaratese II in Milan by Aldo Rossi. Others are less well known, but no less interesting, such as the two pre-war Werkbundsiedlungen, in Zurich and Vienna, that followed the more famous Stuttgart original of 1927. Each estate is described by a page of well-informed text and a couple of carefully chosen pictures. We then enter one of the flats to interview the residents and look at their furniture.
Images taken from ‘Modernist Estates Europe’: Walden 7, Barcelona, by Ricardo Bofill, Taller de Arquitectura; Bloco das Águas Livres in Lisbon, by Nuno Teotónio Pereira and Bartolomeu Costa Cabral
Although this book is certainly of interest to architects, it is not really aimed at them. For one thing, there are no plans – a big draw-back for anyone wishing to understand the design as well as sample the lived experience. There is no comparison with, for example, Mark Swenarton’s recent book ‘Cook’s Camden’ about the work of Neave Brown (who, incidentally, is represented here by the Medina Estate in Eindhoven, designed late in his career). Lifestyle, not architecture, is the appropriate journalistic category and the specially taken photographs – portraits and interiors – are standard property-supplement material. The message seems to be: why not consider this interesting alternative to the suburban semi, the Victorian conversion or the volume-builder’s hutch? You get more space, perhaps a better location, and a way to express your individuality.
‘The Town of Tomorrow – 50 years of Thamesmead’ has a very different purpose: to celebrate the half-centenary of a famous but troubled estate built on the marshy fringe of south-east London. Thamesmead is the perfect example of that concrete-to-brick, novelty-to-normality transition. Most of it is unremarkable brick terraced housing built in the 1980s and 90s. A picturesque little ‘town centre’ is equipped with an eighteenth-century clocktower recycled from the Royal Naval Dockyard in Deptford.
Archival and contemporary images taken from ‘The Town of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Thamesmead’.
But the first phase, built in the early 1970s, was, and is, a modernist’s dream, with handsome, striding towers and a dense matrix of low-rise courtyards bounded by linear cluster blocks like ragged versions of Neave Brown’s famous Alexandra Road. An on-site precast concrete factory provided the basic building components, and faith in the future, rather than fondness for the past, provided the visionary impetus. The shallow lakes that were necessary to control the flood risk, encouraged its planners to populate their perspective views with yachts and dinghies as if it were a Riviera resort. A raised pedestrian deck, close relation of central London examples at the Barbican, London Wall and the South Bank, created further opportunities for architectural drama. One of Thamesmead’s best buildings was the single-storey Lakeside Health Centre by Derek Stow & Partners that extended its chamfered deck out over one of the lakes on V-shaped pilotis. (Declaration of interest: this reviewer was job architect for its 1981 extension).
Sadly, the deck created opportunities for concealed crime and vandalism, and most of it was demolished in the early years of the new century, the health centre disappearing with it. The surviving buildings have now lost some of their coherence, but if you happen to take a tour with a group of young architecture enthusiasts, this is the part of Thamesmead that excites them most. They are probably already moving in.
