Robin Hood Gardens

A utopian idea for modern living is demolished, and the documentary “Robin Hood Gardens” searches the rubble for visions of a bygone era and the reasons for its failure from the beginning in 1972 until today when the building is lying in ruins and the debris has been shipped to the Venice Biennale. This film is about the intentions and the failing of a brutalist housing complex in East London and a search for answers about the failing of modernism.
Together with the photographer Hélène Binet the film explores the specific space of the Robin Hood Gardens short before its demolition in 2017. This poetic investigation pinpoints this iconic building in a current spatial, social, cultural, and political context.
Robin Hood Gardens, a council estate unloved by its first residents in 1972, was hated and loved by internationally renowned critics and decades later earmarked for demolition. The British architects Alison & Peter Smithson failed with their vision, but what is really behind the ostracized facade? The documentary ventures a second look at the construction. Can't we still learn something from the design to improve living in the city of tomorrow?