Not Quite Architecture: Writing around Alison and Peter Smithson

摘要

Robin Hood Gardens (1972), the London housing estate that realized the urban principles of Peter and Alison Smithson, is now in the process of being literally and figuratively deconstructed. As would suit a pair of architects whose professional careers began with musings over the "as found" rubble of postwar London, the Victoria and Albert Museum has stepped in to salvage a three-story section of the structure from the demolition site. The segment, despite the curatorial conservation of its fittings and cabinetry, is no arbitrarily, or even pro-grammatically, determined fragment: it represents a full iteration of the repeated graphic sequence that once formed the building's facade. This pattern of prefabricated parts preserves the centrality of the representational method that was as fundamental to the Smithsons' practice as were off-the-shelf materials.