Ideas - How Brutalist architecture goes beyond aesthetics

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Brutalist architecture has been celebrated as monumental and derided as ‘concrete monstrosity.' But the people who depend on these buildings are often caught in between. IDEAS explores the implications of Brutalism’s 21st-century hipster aesthetic in a world of housing challenges, environmental crisis, and economic polarization. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 11, 2024.

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Don't miss this heart-stopping thriller. Wait until dark at the Shaw. For tickets, go to Shawfest.com. This is a CBC podcast. There was something comforting about going down the rabbit hole. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Going into that stairwell chamber was exciting. We all had an aesthetic response to it.

The building has firmness. It has a stability to it in time. Really rather peculiar, strange, in a good way, architectural form. It's very experimental, very different. Commodity meaning that it responds to the needs of the users. Stunning and strange, curious and inviting. It really grasped you in all of your senses. The smell of the spaces, you know, the sounds.

And then delight, meaning that it's not just construction, but it's also art. So now try to picture a big concrete building, maybe one you've encountered in your travels, or maybe where you live. It feels both incredibly safe and incredibly forward-looking, which I think the concrete and the Brutalist structure was meant to sort of invoke those ideas. So you've got this smooth column that it almost feels like a statue.

Beautiful. And then there are these ribs here created by the actual formwork. My daughter would laugh at me. You guys are always touching walls, what's with it? This concrete frame, skylit roof. Every architect did it in the 1960s. You had to give expression to all pieces of the structure. That structure could be an example of brutalist architecture,

likely from the last century. Most of them seem to fall into one category of either masterpiece or monstruck. And it's not just a matter of taste. Robin Hood Gardens has been caught in this battle between those who would save it and those who would demolish it, where demolition was very clearly intended as a means to vacate the land for speculative property development. Whether a brutalist building dodges the wrecking ball often comes down to whose interests are served by keeping it standing. and who stands to gain if it's demolished? Like, as a kid, I didn't know we lived in a low-income neighborhood,

and I also lived five minutes away from the Science Center, and that was really magical. It's really devastating to think of it something that I'd made an anchor in my childhood, slipping away with time, and I still don't know exactly why. After decades of, at best, mixed reviews, brutalism does have its coterie of fans.

They love the texture of the conquest, the space age vibe, the sheer scale of the buildings. But from its birth, the so-called new brutalism was meant to be not just an aesthetic, but an ethic. I was struck by the way that brutalism was losing its working class qualities, so I really wanted to bring forward again that experience of crisis that the residents of the estate were experiencing in the demolition or in the impending demolition of their homes. brutalism may be cool but that's not often enough

to save a building whose value runs more deeply than that So these are labs I assume these doors are locked Yes Who wants to try one two three four On these deep ends Ideas producer Sean Foley

brings us this documentary Brutalist Architecture Beyond Aesthetics After first year architecture, I worked in an architect's office in Calgary and as a kind gesture he allowed me to design the back facade of a building facing an alleyway and I really didn't put my heart into it and he came and looked at my design and he said you didn't seem to be really interested in this. And I said, no one will see it.

And he said, God will see it. Wow. Throwing down the gauntlet. So did you have to redesign it? Yes. I'm standing at the foot of the Science and Humanities wing with architect Joe Bogdan at the University of Toronto's campus in Scarborough,

just east of the city. We're joined by his daughters, Elizabeth and Stasia, and we're all at the edge of a ravine. It's about as close to a back facade as you can get here. Several stepped back concrete tiers tied together by vertical struts with little teeny windows. You can see it for yourself on our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. It looks like a giant armored vehicle for some intergalactic bank. I wonder if John Andrews, the Australian-born architect of the building, had really meant for anyone to see this side except in aerial photographs.

But today, 60 years on, there's a winding fully accessible pathway leading into the deep ravine below and offering a new relationship to the site. In an era where the construction and the demolition of giant concrete buildings is a threat to the environment, this small modification forges a more integrated. connection between the building and its natural surroundings. I am Joseph, Joe Bogdan. I am an architect from the brutalist period of the 1960s. I was educated first at the University of Manitoba, which was a very modernist school. Then I went to Harvard. And I have been in practice in Toronto for some 55 years, and now

I am residing as a design consultant when needed. I'm Elizabeth, or Liz Bogdan, and I am Joe's eldest daughter. I was educated in geography, but I moved to study History of Design at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1990s. I'm a senior lecturer in history of design

and history of architecture. I have been with Sutherby's Institute of Art since 2003. I'm Stasia Bogdan. I'm the younger daughter. I am a registered architect, worked with Joe for many years. I am Director of Capital Planning in Toronto under the umbrella of Unity Health, Toronto, and found that ultimate intersection of health care, the effect of built and outdoor environments on the health and well-being. of the population?

I should declare myself that I haven't been here probably for 30 years. I came when the building first opened and every architect in Toronto thought it was the greatest piece going. And it was then clear

as the dominant element that should prevail. For me today, to come after 30 or 40 years, the urban context of this is terrible. It's chaotic. It's as if all of these different kinds of architectural expressions have just been dumped in front of the original grand design.

There will be much more here in time as a campus city within the city comes to life. And as the college's population grows, the building will simply grow too. along the ridge of the ravine. The reason that it's one building is an attempt to cope with the Canadian climate. The temperature on the side of Scarborough College could be as much as 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit for quite a substantial part of the year.

Since 1964, when it was a remote outpost, Scarborough College has become University of Toronto Scarborough, a very busy, highly diverse learning community that's added several major buildings. but in Joe Bogdan's estimation, perhaps not in harmony with the original structure. Stasia Bogdan offers her perspective. One of the keys of the original linked design was that the space is your navigation and you find those destinations along a comfortable path, an indoor comfortable path with views to the ravine versus trying to find your way across parking lots to building A, B, or C. Right, and the interior street is like,

It's a key concept in the brutalist. No, absolutely. And if you go back to the 60s in the UK, if I may. Oh, please do. Take us there. And you think about the great initiators of the kind of new brutalism, and that's Peter and Allison Smithen. In the late 1960s, their heroic design and also the cause of their decline was

Robin Hood Gardens, and that was the streets in the sky design and plan that very consciously they wanted it to feel like a Victorian street. Okay, okay, all right. And that was not its downfall. Its downfall was the fact that the build had so many structural and construction problems and also where it was the location in London in terms of crime and low-income kind of density.

And so it became seen as so many post-war housing projects, brutalist or not, came to be seen associated with where you went to get your heroin. Liz has touched on brutalism's Bet Noir. Public housing, or council estates, as they're called in the UK, in particular Robin Hood Gardens. Robin Hood Gardens was built in 1972 in East London and demolished in 2018. It was designed by the Smithson's, Alison and Peter, brutalism's first couple.

As Allison and Peter Smithson put it, the architects who established the movement, brutalism was the seeing of materials for what they were, the woodness of wood, the sand. sand. My name's Nick Thoburn. I'm a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. I'm the author of a book called Brutalism As Found, Housing, Form and Crisis at Robin Hood Gardens. Bruteless architecture was also a direct and critical engagement with the social world. And it does so without disguising how this world is itself awkward, jarring and conflictual. This is the meaning of the smitten's statement that brutalism, to quote them,

tries to face up to a mass production society and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work. Here's Peter and Alison Smithson from the 1970 BBC TV program, The Smithsons on Housing. We regard it as a demonstration of a more enjoyable way of living in an old industrial part of a city. It is a model of a new mode of urban organisation. When we first started thinking about housing, we used to talk of objects as found. But as anything and everything can be raised by association to become the poetry of the ordinary.

The as found is a brutalist method or a sensibility. And the idea is that building materials, a building site, a society should be engaged with as they are found. And so the architect shouldn't impose built form on a cleansed and dehistoricized site, but the architect should grow architecture out of encounters with the site as found. A site on an industrial blight, or one's industrial heritage, it depends how you look at it, can very easily be used to renew a district. Industrial sites are somehow forthright and honest. So not as an architect, but as a researcher or as somebody experiencing an estate,

to approach it as found is to approach it as it exists in the present, in all of its complex qualities. It should be understood through immersion in all of the social and material and site-like qualities of the estate that's being studied, including residents' own experiences. Despite many efforts to preserve it, Robin Hood Gardens is no more. But you can see pictures of it on our website,

cbc.ca.ca.com slash ideas. The Scarborough College building by John Andrews is still standing and remains an integral part of life at the University of Toronto. And there's one more building to introduce here, a classic that's currently floating in liminal space behind a huge perimeter of blue wire fence panels guarded by police and private security, the Ontario Science Center, designed by the late Raymond Moriama.

I think the science center felt a bit like a home, away from home. I didn't always like being at home. We lived in a really small apartment. My name is Zaharine Tereftar, and I grew up in the Thorncliffe Park area around five minutes away from the Science Center, which we're both facing out right here. And I am a 25-year-old Toronto-based creative. Having the Science Center in my neck of the woods was an affirmation for me, I think, even as a child, that I deserved spaces like this, spaces where I could see other people and other

families all also participating in the ritual of like this like ritualized joy of learning about science and it's really devastating to think of it something that I'd made an anchor in my childhood slipping away with time and I I still don't know exactly why the Ontario Science Center is shutting down immediately over concerns that the building's roof could collapse. On June 21st, 24, a Friday. The Ontario Science Center was abruptly closed. Last Friday, people got a shock when these fences went up and the Science Center buildings behind them closed down. Not everyone agrees on how dire the situation really was. It turns out just six panels across three buildings were at critical risk of collapsing. Between two and six percent of the roof panels inspected were also at high

risk. The rest of the roof panels only needed to be reviewed every one to three years. But the fate of Moriamas' gem has been precarious for quite some time. For years, the province has denied funding requests from the Science Center for repairs to the building. In April 2023, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the Science Center would be moved to a redeveloped Ontario place on the Toronto Waterfront. You can walk or cycle over to the new state-of-the-art science center. And by the way, we'm talking about this Science Center, probably the worst kept secret,

where you can explore the latest and interactive exhibits or catch the movie at an upgraded synosphere. The original building would be demolished to make way for an unspecified type of housing, and the new science center would be built beside an enormous spa and water park touted as a major tourist attraction. So I hesitate when people say that a newer science center built near the waterfront might bring in more tourists, for example, because immigrants also have families that want to come and visit them, as the immigrant communities in this Thorncliffe Park and Flemington Park do as well. I remember bringing my family, my extended family from the States, to the science center, to this neighborhood.

It's a feather in your cap, you know, to be able to say, hey, I live near here, and this is what we've got in this. this neighborhood. It's not an anchor for the community in any other place. It's just a science center. In all of its like sort of brutalist glory, I think it represents safety. Children need places to play safely and learn about the world safely. And if you can't get that at home and you can't really get that at school and it's often for structural reasons that have nothing to do with the parents and the teachers, but it has to do with the realities of just poverty, you have places like the Science Center, and this is all a lot of kids had here. The most important thing in architecture is actually to get buildings built.

Architect John Andrews. There's no use for buildings that are lying around in drawers as unused drawings. And after all, buildings are for people, and the only significant object of building and is to make sure that it solves the problem of the people that are about to use it. But what happens once the people that are about to use it become the people who now depend on it? Scarborough actually consists of two wings that come together at an elbow or a knuckle or a junction, whatever you'd like to call it, the meeting place on which the streets converge from different levels, and it is also lit from above by a system of skylights through which the sun and light can come into the meeting place itself.

John Andrews himself saw several of his own works demolished in his, his lifetime. In his 80s, he reflected on his first major architectural triumph, saying, it isn't brutal. Scarborough College is a very human building. The interesting piece about this is the use of topography. The college has, you know, the lower ravine side, and then you're now you're up elevated and you're, you're looking. We're looking straight into the tree canopy from this, you know, the big wide staircase. We're now standing at The Knuckle, the space between the two wings of this very human building, atop a grand stairway, looking down at the central green and the Great Ravine Beyond.

The buildings on either side of us are sporting these tall cylinders, like big benevolent ushers. These shapes also give us clues as to what and who was. dominating the architectural conversation in the 1960s. Well, and this is very cool, right? Like these curved volumes here. It's almost like a little bonus. Yeah, it's a piece of sculpture. Yeah, it uses concrete in all its ways.

The fact that concrete can be molded to almost any form. But I think Stasia just said kind of off camera how Corbusian's bits of it feel. And not the whole thing, but certainly this organic sculptural rounded section, it's absolutely right. And it's not, it's a little bit unite, but I think you're right, Stasia, it is really more laterate. And it's interesting, that's 1953.

Okay, briefly, Corbusian refers to the Swiss-Frenching, architect and godfather of modern architecture, Le Corbusier. Unite refers to Unite d'Abitation, his apartment building concept, and La Tourette is a monastery he designed in the countryside near Lyon. It's amazing just how O'Courant John Andrew's work was at the time. But, so if this is 64 and La Tourette was 53, it's no time. at all. And Andrews was very young, right, Dad? I mean, he was 29, 30 years old. And so do you not just kind of choose, what are my heroes designing or what am I responding to aesthetically

and in terms of function? But as somebody who was designing buildings in the 60s, I don't think architects said, hmm, let me see what kind of a brutalist building I can create. Exactly. 1953 is the big year. It is the year that

the Smithsons pronounce for better for ill that something was happening in architecture and they called it brutalism. I don't know if the Corbusier called it brutalism. I don't think he didn't.

But, you know, they were making reference to him. I mean, they were clearly completely enamored with Lecobusier, who was hugely influential on much of their thinking. This emphasis on the expressive qualities of raw concrete, you know, the baton bruce, the raw concrete, which is part of the source of the definition, there's also a very strong critique of Lucubusier in the Smithsons' work, which was a critique of the modern plan, the functional plan

that was developed by Lecobusier and modernist architecture. And for the Smithsons, this was very much a means of controlling and ordering city space that they wanted to be released to become much more fluid, much more experimental and open. As new technologies and opportunities for financial gain come to the fore, a variety of motivations can determine the fate of a building and a community. I'm interested in Robin Hood Gardens as a piece of living architecture, you know, as an estate where working class and minoritized Londoners lived for 50 years

and experienced and produced the architecture through their living. It's often claimed that these estates are failures, but actually these narratives of failure are intended to help demolish the estate for private rebuild. And so Robin Hood Gardens was caught up in this very strong force of demolition that's really taken hold of London. You have to wonder, is a similar narrative coalescing around the Ontario Science Center? Here's Premier Doug Ford in April 2023. All of us grew up going to the Science Center one time or another. It's tired.

And in summer 2024. That place is absolutely just a total mess. From top to bottom to the front to back to every single building. building. I feel like I want to sort of reach out and touch the building one last time, which has been denied to me by these fences and I'm really sad about that. But yeah, it's a building that's always been tactile and I think that's something that Moriama talked about in wanting it to be a very tactile, joyful, curious experience. What you see up there is one million volts of electricity.

One of the things I can do is light up a fluorescent tube without actually touching anything. Now how about a volunteer? Lots of people don't like brutalism. And that's okay. But I think we miss a lot when we don't try and look for the beauty and the values that stand behind Brutalist buildings. You read up what Morayama's dreams and aspirations for the Science Center were. They're so embedded in the form of the building itself. Okay, what I'm trying to do is,

is translate the past, the Oriental Confucius Saint, into today, hopefully I'll move towards the future. What composition do I use? What I did, and this may be a bit arbitrary, is to use the Japanese character, heart to heart. Japanese is like the center of all thing. So if you look at it simply from the sky, it makes a symbolic heart. I think when we look at this, John Andrews, I think his very first thought was, what a beautiful ravine site.

And how can we take advantage of that? Why don't we create this continuum of science-related disciplines and humanities disciplines, and wrap it around the ravine and respect the ravine? and yes, concrete was the material you went to. Scarborough certainly is one of the first, if not the first Canadian building to make extensive use of concrete, both as a structure and as a finish. It's rather much like a seashell. I think on the outside where the elements are, it's very rugged and rough.

On the inside where the people live, it's very smooth. What I find interesting is that even though we're looking at the concrete facade with these pods that kind of pop out and kind of looks overbearing but each of the entrances are kind of these smaller human-scaled addresses versus some of these other buildings that have you know one big entrance that's very clear this is this is the entrance so it's just an interesting juxtaposition of a low feeling of pedestrian scale versus coming up to a place that is very big and airy with respect to the entrances Joe in a previous conversation one of the first things you said about brutalism

was that actually there was a reassuring quality to the concrete. There was a kind of embracing or a refuge there that was, you know, was kind of very much a post-war thing. Yeah, actually, Liz and Stasia and I have talked about this, and I'm not sure we all agree with that, but my thought was that post-war Europe and Great Britain and France were so decimated by the war. and the whole notion of shelter was lost,

there was this, I think, innate unspoken need, both by architects and maybe the public to recreate solidity and safety and security as one of the elements of the new architecture going forward. But that's just one thought I had. You know, let's be safe now. And so concrete and the idea of a cave and even these entrances that we see here is all good. It's also interesting that over time, the lower elements, which are, as Stasia said, of a human scale, relates to the human and the big concrete masses step back, higher and away from you.

Over time, ivy has grown over them, so you have this naturalization of these brutalistic or massive concrete walls. Yeah, yeah. And we're all going to great extents now to look at the evidence-based effect of natural features on building occupancy. I think architects would work pretty hard these days to create a green wall that kind of looks like this. So it's kind of an ironic aging of the building. Have any of you architecture buffs out there noticed how cool brutalism has become over the last few years? that uptick in hipness did not escape Nick Thoburn. I was struck by the way that brutalism was becoming very much a coffee table book aesthetic,

a means of kind of middle-class self-making, if we can put it like that, and was losing, we were losing an understanding of how brutalism, or at least brutalist council housing, was built to serve, you know, working-class inhabitants. The working class tends to be presented as an identity, you know, a cultural identity, a social identity, which is then often said to be in crisis or of the past. But actually, the working class in Marxism is the condition of being pulled apart by social relations. It's not an identity. It's a condition of the loss or the destruction of identity. So if we understand class as a condition of crisis, then it's not outmobile.

If anything, our societies are ever more class today than they have been in the past because more and more people are living in conditions of crisis globally. My parents are Bangladeshi Canadian immigrants, and one of the best ways to ensure that immigrants are able to feel safe and welcomed in the neighborhoods that they live in is to have anchors like this. that are accessible to them. If we want to contribute to a future where immigrant and newcomer communities feel like they are part of this country

and part of this province and meaningfully contributing to the future of it, they have to have things like this. I know that it contributed to my sense of the world and my sense of belonging here. Zahirin Tarrafdar, Toronto-based creative and alumna, if you will, of the Ontario Science Center. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on SiriusXM and U.S. Public Radio, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world, at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas.

You can find ideas wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. The Shaw Festival in Niagara on the Lake presents tons of money, a hilarious British forest that will have you rolling in the aisles. A young man fakes his own death and impersonates his cousin to collect a huge inheritance. What could possibly go wrong? Don't miss this side-splitting comedy. Tons of money at the Shaw.

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Right on! When debt's got you, you've got us. The Counseling Society a call today. Visit no more debts.org. The realities of our working life are going to be traffic, noise, air pollution, vandalism, lack of quality. To hear Alison Smithson tell it, architecture doesn't seem all that glamorous, does it? But for her and her husband and architectural partner, Peter Smithson, brutalism was more than an aesthetic. It was an ethic.

which might seem a little strange to those of us who see a building and decide whether it's beautiful or not. A general objective when we get a new site is to knit together what is good in the surroundings by the insertion of a new building. We begin to identify with a site to put down mental roots, hooking on to Rose Bay, Willow Herb, the children overturning wrecked cars, the smell of curry on the stairs of rejected tenements, oddments of past character, the big power stations. For the Smithsend's brutalism is a critical response to society. Sociologist Nick Tholburn is the author of Brutalism as Found, housing, form and crisis at Robin Hood Gardens.

Robin Hood Gardens is a response to a set of, class conditions or a set of crisis conditions in the site where they were building. And the first and the most famous is the streets in the sky. And here, the architecture is responding to the problem of the degrading of the streets by the dominance and the pollution and the danger of the car. The theory developed in the 20s and 30s, the simple architecture, in which there would be few cars, this dream, this model has been, overrun, overrun by the gluts of the supermarkets

and the glutts on the roads. And their response is to raise the street up from ground level and into the expanse of open sky. Breatthaking views, a feeling of openness, a very rich sensory experience of openness to the environment, and social spaces of play and encounter for the residents. And so it's vital for the Smithsense that residents would

put to use or play with or develop these streets in the sky through their use and what we saw at Robin Hood Gardens was a use that was very much conditioned by minoritized experience of East Londoners by class experience of East Londoners one resident we spoke to describe the streets in the sky as being like Bangladesh because they enabled his family and community to live an outdoor life You know, it's an extraordinary thing to say about East London. And yet it's precisely this deforming of the street in this particular social way that the Smithons would have been very excited about

and what they tried to design into the building. I'm just trying to think, I think these exits where the bridges are may actually house stairwells. No, I don't think so. Like this one wouldn't, but maybe this one up here. Yeah, this is a stairwell Okay, so So let's see if we can

Yes All right, ooh Need oh I love the smell Amazing John Andrews used the brutalest concept of the internal street To great effect at Scarborough College

But stepping into this stairwell Reveals influences that go back century It's an exciting discovery. Okay, look. One right picture. Oh, my gosh. Liz Bogdan, in a really echoey, but also beautiful, stairwell. This is like Boromini.

In Rome? Borgon. Oh, in Rome, really? Yes. This is also Christopher Wren. Oh. So, I mean, this is 16th century, Europe. Really?

and this would be like a 16th century what uh stairwell in the can't it with a whoa or in a villa i'll show you pictures yeah okay do that do that and this kind of with this cantilever construction so accepted in 20th century architecture but or a meeting was and christopher wren the first to utilize that in kind of late renaissance architecture, the sense of floating structure. How is it suspended? How is it supported? So, of course, concrete and steel, they are the perfect materials to go together to realize that cantilever beauty and principle. But architects in the Renaissance, post-Renaissance, into the Baroque, obviously, did not.

They were using stone and other... And timbers, yeah, yeah. So they would have been pretty thrilled if they had a chance to work with concrete? They would have been, yeah. Christopher Wren would have said, done it. I'm on to something else now.

Sorry, we went back to the Renaissance when we were in our rabbit hole. We did back to the time travel. That was cool. Emerging back into the light and air, Stasia describes a different experience of the stairwell. It felt claustrophobic. I can't really imagine that with too many students running up and down.

Yeah, it felt kind of like a lost space a little bit. Oh, interesting. Okay. I got excited. maybe this i don't know why but because i could smell the concrete oh it's beautiful i mean beautiful concrete and beautiful shape and um well i would just need a little bit more lighting to kind of brighten it up a little bit it was interesting to me aesthetically because it's the sun is at its height now and we're feeling that okay it's late may in toronto it's getting a little hot but that little

we got to scurry up something that's very what about five o'clock in january right oh yeah Yeah, that would be. When it's dark. On a Wednesday. And school is still on. Yeah. I think it's where perhaps the architect gave into his aesthetic desires rather than, you know, how do I make this as accessible and as functional as possible.

I have to have a staircase. Why don't I do something for me? I would say gross generalization. that Londoners would not have one single problem with this. This is something so in the DNA of Londoners. In the Barbican, which is later, that's 1970s, you know, now the most celebrated brutalist complex in London, in the UK, if not the world at the moment,

they're hugely proud of these little refuge stairwell refuges. Hi there. Hi. I'm doing an architecture podcast. I'm wondering if my guest and I might be able to walk around just the front here or something like that. You'll have to call somebody. Okay.

Get permission. Okay. Is that something that's possible if I go through that? Have people been granted permission to tour around? Do you know? Honestly, I doubt that, but you can try. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, thanks for, thanks for your help. Appreciate it. No worries. Take care. Okay.

Well, yeah, I guess we can see a little more closer to the... Yeah, I used to get so excited going into the entrance. And also, this is, like, I remember this being a place where children would just, like, be around playing this entrance over here. It's designed in such a fun way. I don't know if you, you can sort of see that. step-ish area. Yeah. Those big steps and families would sort of set up there. It almost looks like the, when you see the, like the rice plantations in. Exactly.

It's interesting too because you think about the grand museum buildings. Yeah. You go up to the, you know, this is you're going down into. Going down into, it's a little, it's a little weirder almost. But that's exciting. Kids like weird things. Kids have vivid imaginations just to be able to, like. like run up and down these steps, go down into the science center, play tag.

And there's like the little hillside up here and the little, the beautiful, wavy, concrete walls and things. And then even as you continue deeper into the heart of the building, it's sort of you continue downward, close to the earth, you know. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's totally what we're all supposed to be doing these days, right? Yeah. Exactly. Being grounded, being rooted. There's definitely, a groundedness to the concrete and also into going in, but then, you know, there was just, like, all the exhibits dedicated to space and to the future. And I remember seeing in the Omnamax Theater, a documentary that's like looking at the stars. It's both really entering the

world that we live in and also taking off from it in some ways. And for a child to make that connection, just visually in, with touch and presence. Yes. You're able to burrow in, and you're also able to feel like you're flying. This is also good, too, that when you come in, you have an opening to the other side, to the back. Yeah, like straight ahead. Yeah, see it from the courtyard side. As big as the Andrews' building in.

Scarborough is, it's also quite narrow, which allows the outside and inside to intermingle more readily. We're surrounded on three sides by the building, and then this beautiful ravine kind of falling away in a forest on the fourth side. But what are these building forms saying to you guys? Well, it's interesting that it's the opposite of what we saw on the other side, where the building forms stepped away from you. Here, they increase in size as you go up on the floor. So each floor overhangs the floor below. To me, I think it offers, again, a sense of shelter,

of containment of this public space. It doesn't overwhelm me as if the buildings are trying to fall down on me. On the front of the building, there are no windows. so it is fortress-like but when you come in it's this kind of very intimate space where there's lots of visual and it feels very transparent versus the outside which is very solid

and it's very human and the humanism of using this material was not just accidental this was something that architects at the time were very conscious. They wanted of creating a human space. The material wasn't seen as something called. Quite the opposite.

Right about that time, Alison and Peter Smithson were trying to imbue every aspect of Robin Hood Gardens with a similar humanism. The site itself was deeply inhospitable. It was bordered by two thunderous rows. Now, a typical response at that time, and I think still today, would have been to place a tower or two in the centre of a nondescript plot of land, you know, pulling away from the roads. But here instead, the buildings were pushed to the edges of the site and laid down, like horizontal tower blocks, if you like.

It also served to carve out a protected green space between the two buildings. with a two-story landscaped mound at the centre, which was assembled from the rubble of the construction. And this provided a stress-free zone, the Smithsons called it. It's a stress-free zone, but it's also a charged void in their phrase. Charged, you know, in terms of our emotions and our senses, through its relation to the sheer walls of the bordering buildings. We spoke to kids and adults and elderly people who would play or garden or sunbathe

or winter sledge. or we just sort of encounter urban nature. People talked about opening the French doors in their bedrooms and just feeling the space outside, seeing the green, feeling the strange presence of this mound at the centre. I mean, it's a vital part, really, of how the estate function. Buildings, of course, have a continuous life. They breathe and get old and either improve with age or some of them die.

And here we have a building that should not die. Can it be improved? Are these vertical elements, opportunities for solar panels with openings, with transparency, or not? but are they opportunities for bringing it into the 22nd century rather than leaving it? In a 2018 interview, Raymond Morayama said he knew what he would do next with his Ontario Science Center, but he wryly declined to say any more. At the moment, for Zaharine Terfdar, the conversation is more existential. My ideal wish, and I think this is the case for anyone who really loved at Science Center,

is for it to remain where it is, for the province to invest the funds necessary to get it back to the state-of-the-art facilities that it had many decades ago and for all of us in this community to be able to enjoy it again. But if we can't get back to the Ontario Science Center, then my hope at the very least is that this building is preserved sitting down with the local community and getting their thoughts on what the building could be. Robin Hood Gardens suffered from what's sometimes called managed decline, that is the local authority didn't invest in it properly.

So it was in a pretty sorry state of repair, but it absolutely didn't fail at all as an estate, as a home, as a piece of architecture. And the residents we spoke to really confirmed that or expressed that. that. It was very rare to speak to people who lived there that said they didn't like it or that it was a failure. And that, of course, is even after they have known and experienced all of this stigmatisation, I think if you tell people long enough that their homes are awful and a failure, as many people might start to believe it. But that wasn't what was going on at Robin Hood Gardens. People were very upset by the lack of repair, of course.

So it was presented as a failure. It was described as a concrete monstrosity and it sat on an extraordinary valuable piece of land that would become much more valuable when that estate is removed. So it's a means of extracting new kinds of wealth, new sites of investment, new means to launder money, new financial instruments, and so many different parties are involved, you know,

from local to national government, to estate agencies, to mortgage brokers, to builders, to the house-building industry, to private investors themselves. And, of course, none of these people are council estate residents. Council estate residents and their homes just get in the way. As Robin Hood Gardens was being demolished, the Victoria and Albert Museum, or VNA, for short, got involved.

As Nick Thoburn describes, their intervention brought about new complications. It's a macabre story, really. The VNA salvaged a whole apartment from the estate, complete with original fittings, which it partially exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and it will soon in store permanently at the new VNA East Museum.

which itself is on a post-Olympics regeneration site in East London. So what was condemned as a concrete monstrosity when it housed working-class residence is now championed as a fragment of a brutalist masterpiece now that it serves middle-class audiences, the exhibit is lifting Robin Hood Gardens out of the housing crisis in the present and placing it into the sealed and sanitised past of a museum artefew. So people might say, well, but isn't it great that something was saved? But I don't think it is.

I think in saving, it's contributing to the covering over of the crisis of social housing. It's very dark, really. Using that which is being destroyed in order to rebrand the process of its destruction, you know, the VNAid likes to say that this will be a prompt for discussion about social housing, but it cannot but serve to rebrand a site of social cleansing. Stasia, you, like, I feel you've responded with a certain amount of concern to various parts of, not like, you're not like, it's not like a wet blanket thing or anything, but do you know what I mean? Well, yeah, I guess I, I suppose from, if you think of a sustainability and a longevity, it's an old building and it is, you know, it's not a building you're going to tear down. But to keep it a living building and to do the things that, you know, an institution would probably want to do is a lot of investment that it needs.

You can see that everywhere. Like, that's your mind is showing you that. Because that's what you do. That's what I do. Wow, you actually did stuff like this, four store, five stories high, all poured. concrete forms. It must have felt like the future. You were seeing the future. Very much. Yeah,

no, for sure. It was all part of this megastructure concept that architects thought would become the future. You know, and it never really did. But it's interesting that the idea has been lost here. It could have been a

four-story glass gallery as the grand main street connected to this at this end with all these other glass pods and brick pods hooked on to it right like anything that would come along all right you're hired too late too late awesome awesome on ideas you've been listening to brutalist architecture Beyond Aesthetics by producer Sean Foley. Featuring Joe, Liz, and Stasia Bogdan, Nick Thoburn, and Zahirayn Terfdar. Special thanks to Jean-Anne Stewart at CBC London.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.