The model
The model is a site layout of the two blocks and central green space of Robin Hood Gardens, a social housing project in East London; the first of the blocks demolished in 2018. The model was created to illustrate the scheme in a 30-minute BBC documentary ‘The Smithsons on Housing’ in 1970, produced by B.S. Johnson. It was made outside the Smithson office, commissioned from the architect Jeremy Dixon (now Sir Jeremy Dixon, born 1939), who had previously worked for a short period for the Smithsons. Composed of built-up and glued millimetre ply, and set on a blockboard base, the model has been finished in silver and metallised green car paint on a white primer that gives the surface a gloss sheen.

Alison + Peter Smithson, architects
Wife and husband Alison (1928 –1993) and Peter Smithson (1923 –2003) formed an architectural partnership that led British New Brutalism (often simply called Brutalism) through the latter half of the twentieth century. The Smithsons first came to prominence with Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1949-54, a stripped down Miesian structure which was rough and ready in appearance, a challenge to the sleek and smooth Modernism admired at the time. In 1956, with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, they created an installation in the influential This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, showing found objects, a comment on fractured space. The same year they created The House of the Future in an exhibition.

The Smithsons were great design rebels, writing and lecturing worldwide on their views; the older generation are still divided over the Smithsons’ legacy, the younger generation consider them heroes of the architectural age. Their politics and dogma gained them few commissions for architects of their stature, but did include the highly praised Economist Building in St James’s, London (1959-65). The Robin Hood Estate is their ultimate and only built statement on social housing.

Robin Hood Gardens
Robin Hood Gardens is located in the southeast quarter of Poplar, on a difficult site sided on the east with the northern Blackwall Tunnel approach, and on the west with the busy trunk road bordering the north-eastern corner of Canary Wharf. Commissioned by the Greater London Council (GLC), Alison and Peter Smithson instituted their ideas on social housing which they had been widely known for since the early 1950s, particularly ‘the building as street’: flats accessed by wide access decks where residents could meet. The exterior was a precast concrete system from Sweden, assembled on-site. The first of the two blocks was completed about 1970, the whole estate by 1972.