Poetry of the Ordinary

Year:
2015
Location:
Cambridge, MA

Set within the wider framework of “Living Anatomy: an Exhibition about Housing,” this exhibition was curated and designed by Daniel in Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The Exhibition featured ‘Robin Hood Gardens’ – Alison and Peter Smithson’s housing project in East London, completed in 1972 and partly demolished in 2017 despite a public campaign that sought to secure its preservation.

Consisting of 213 apartments organized in two long, curved building blocks with a central, topographically-morphed green space between them, Robin Hood Gardens was planned with an ambition for human interaction and association. Drawing on original materials from the Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, part of the Special Collections of the Frances Loeb Library, the detailed drawings, documents, and photographs shown here highlight the social experimentalism that stands at the base of this influential project. Never intended to be a photogenic exemplar of modern housing, Robin Hood Gardens remains a provocative and brave new form, a place with an extraordinary character that is capable of offering its residents an ordinarily poetic life.

New Exhibition at Harvard GSD Focuses on Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson

ArchDaily, September 2015