Brutalist, original, but a slum

This week's decision on the fate of an East End estate could determine the future of other Sixties monuments, says Peter Popham

The contentious issue of whether unpopular but "important" modern buildings should be listed surfaces again this week, as the London borough of Tower Hamlets wrestles with the question of what to do about Robin Hood Gardens, its decaying and neglected Sixties estate on the Isle of Dogs.

Eleven years ago, viewers polled by Thames Television voted it one of the three worst modern buildings in the capital, in the distinguished company of the high-rise Alton East Estate in Roehampton and Trellick Tower in Notting Hill Gate. It was not a surprise; there was never anything ingratiating about Robin Hood Gardens. Completed in 1972, it was one of the most uncompromising specimens of the Brutalist tendency in British architecture. The estate was designed by the wife-and-husband team of Alison and Peter Smithson, who were Brutalism's standard bearers, and whose ideas and example inspired dozens of other housing schemes around the country, all of them now reviled, execrated and deeply unfashionable.

The estate is back in the spotlight because earlier this year Tower Hamlets invited five architects to submit feasibility studies for a small extension to it - housing concierge facilities - to improve security. Peter Smithson (Alison died in 1993) was not consulted, but one of the architects who had been approached by the council alerted him to the proposal. Smithson was outraged at the council's lack of courtesy in not consulting him, and called for the building to be spot-listed.

Subsequently the London Dockland Development Corporation (LDDC), the planning authority, rejected Tower Hamlets' proposal for the extension, and advised the council's planners to invite Smithson to be involved in the design. Tower Hamlets concurred, and last week Smithson finally met the planners and aired his views. A spokesman for Tower Hamlets said the council had been told to "put off making a decision about the estate until LDDC had finished its investigation into whether it should be listed"; but LDDC denies that listing is in their sights.

The fact that listing is even being mooted will make many non-architects see red. But following the listing two years ago of Sir Denys Lasdun's abandoned and disintegrating Bethnal Green tower block, Keeling House, public opinion is stealthily being softened up to accept the notion that some of the buildings we most love to hate deserve to be frozen just the way they are.

In the case of Keeling House, listing was probably the only thing that saved it from destruction - and even now its survival is conditional on whether or not the Heritage Memorial Fund decides it is worth nearly pounds 10m of lottery money to rehabilitate. Their verdict is expected next month.

In terms of architectural history, there are clear grounds for preserving both Keeling House and Robin Hood Gardens. Built 15 years apart (Keeling House dates from 1957), both buildings show how some of the most gifted British architects of their generation tried to address the failings and excesses of Modernism.

Under the inspiration of Le Corbusier and CIAM, the modern movement's ruling council, modern architecture's answer to housing needs was stark and simple: huge slabs or towers of housing rising majestically and disdainfully above the old towns, set in sprawling parkland and totally divorced from the historical fabric. Trellick Tower, designed by the Hungarian emigre Erno Goldfinger, is as brilliant an example as we possess of the splendour and arrogance of such visions. Even today it can take your breath away.

But this was a wind from the Continent, and its extremism put it at odds with the English temper of compromise, consensus and good manners. In 1953, the Smithsons led an attack on CIAM's rigid ideology that was to resonate down the years - arguably the first assault on the edifice of Modernism, an assault which was to climax 25 years later in the Prince of Wales's speech about "monstrous carbuncles".

" 'Belonging' ", they wrote, "is a basic emotional need ... From 'belonging' - identity - comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails."

The "short narrow street of the slum" became the perverse inspiration for both Lasdun and the Smithsons. With his 16-storey Keeling House, crammed into a narrow site between Victorian terraces and a tenement block, Denys Lasdun tried to recreate the cosy congestion of the slums high in the sky. Four blocks project from a central service core - imagine four fat men trapped in a revolving door - each shadowing and overlooking the next, so that a good spit would travel from one balcony to the next.

The building's originality is beyond doubt, but the fact that it was not much imitated is probably significant. For one critic, Paul Thompson, writing in 1963, its evocation of the slums was all too successful. "Standing in the well of the entrance," he wrote, "the coarse bare concrete pencilled with obscenities, looking up at the criss-cross pattern of galleries above, recalling perhaps a Piranesi engraving of a prison, [it is difficult] not to feel that the architect's real intention (and achievement) was to combine ... the aesthetic effects of an East End backyard and a Neapolitan tenement."

Robin Hood Gardens did not attempt to imitate the hugger-mugger quality of the slums in this literal fashion; instead it pioneered the idea of "streets in the air", with walkways through each block at two-storey intervals, giving each flat a front door on to a street, which would then, the theory went, hum with jolly cockney life as brawny housewives in curlers stepped outside to water the plants and trade gossip.

It never worked. Whether because of the lack of traffic or lack of neighbours across the street or lack of defensible space, these walkways have always been empty and sterile at best, lawless at worst. Last week I paced one of these streets with Peter Smithson, noting glumly how unloved it remains, how barren of almost anything - plant pot or hanging basket or decoration, or anything else connoting possession or pride, with the exception of doormats and one solitary bench. Instead, "streets in the air" have become a byword for the alienation and policing difficulties of such blocks.

Robin Hood Gardens is not an easy place to love. As a Bethnal Green resident remarked about Keeling House, "You wouldn't exactly walk past it and say, 'that's nice'." "Honesty to materials" was a key Brutalist idea, but the relentless, roughly finished grey concrete of its structure seems now an unforgivably harsh material to condemn people to live with. (Smithson, tedious to relate, lives in a whitewashed Victorian house in Kensington.)

Yet Robin Hood Gardens has many admirable qualities. Trapped between two dreadful roads, the two serpentine blocks act as bulwarks against the noise, so the large green space in between, dotted with hummocks, is an oasis of quiet. The bull-like, uncompromising form of the blocks has a rugged charm about it, trapped as it is now among the high gloss of Dockland's new buildings. It is like running into Crocodile Dundee at the Lord Mayor's Banquet.

Even its designer confesses that it now looks "like a relic of an earlier period, like a dinosaur washed up on a beach" in its transformed surroundings. But his faith in the design is unshaken. "It came out of the classic postwar feeling that you had the right to change things, to change society," he said. "With architecture, nobody knows if you're talented for three generations. But there were two exhibitions of interpretations of our work last year, and another one is opening soon at the Pompidou Centre: the reassessment of our work is just beginning. It's the normal thing: the sons deny the father, then the grandsons turn back to him, and in a sense he becomes a hero."

When the Smithsons were designing Robin Hood Gardens, the word "Victorian" was still a term of abuse. Peter Smithson is sure that Robin Hood Gardens will have another day in the sun. "Let it be," he says of Robin Hood Gardens. "Let the trees and grass grow, even if the place is a mess. In a couple of generations it will be appreciated."

But should it be listed? Smithson avoids giving a straight answer. "If there's only one example of something, I think it should be preserved as a curiosity. Stonehenge is the obvious example: you list something because it's a freak example. A building has to change - by which I don't mean it needs to. But making changes to a building like this is frightfully hard - it's like writing a new bit of a Fitzgerald novel or a Beatles song. It can be done, but it's extremely difficult."

Listing or demolition? Aspic or dynamite? While the Heritage Memorial Fund mulls Keeling House's future, and Tower Hamlets' planners huddle with Smithson, words of advice from readers will be appreciated.