Robin Hood Gardens

In 2017, demolition began of Robin Hood Gardens, the Brutalist housing estate in Poplar, east London, completed in 1972 by British architects Alison and Peter Smithson.

Its razing marked the end of a decade-long campaign to save the building, which was controversially denied listed status, and marked the start of a £300m redevelopment of the site and surrounding area. 

On the eve of destruction, the V&A salvaged a three-storey section of each facade and the interior fittings of two flats, as an internationally recognised example of Brutalism. The museum also commissioned South Korean artist Do Ho Suh, whose practice centres on the idea of home as both a physical structure and lived experience, to create a work in response to the architecture and interiors while the second of the two blocks, also due to be demolished, was still occupied.

Suh’s panoramic film, Robin Hood Gardens, Woolmore Street, London E14 0HG, is both site‑specific and time-specific – a document of the Smithsons’ modular interiors as they have been adapted and furnished by residents. Suh used time‑lapse photography, drone footage, 3D-scanning and photogrammetry to create a visual journey in which the camera ceaselessly pans through and around the building.

It is a meditation on home, memory and displacement within a physical structure that is on the verge of demolition, less than 50 years after the architects’ utopian vision was realised. Suh is interested in the “intangible quality” of Robin Hood Gardens as much as its architectural shell: the “energy, history, life and memory that has accumulated there”.

Supported by Venice Architecture Biennale Fund in memory of Martin Roth. Victoria Miro and Lehmann Maupin