For three months I have lived in the Wimbledon House. I shared the house with my colleague fellow Shantel Blakely. As devoted scholars we created our own temporary mini-convent, a space for concentration and reflection, but at times also celebration when we invited friends and colleagues over for events, either a seminar, a film shoot or a Sunday soirée with drinks. To be able to enjoy the house was magnificent for sure, the spaciousness of the interior, the long views over the common, the generous light and simply having the privilege to be in London, to explore its vast cultural landscape in these dynamic and also unsettling times of Brexit and the housing crisis. Yet looking back now, what sort of a house is the Wimbledon House really? What is it like living in a glass house?

Last week, the Victoria & Albert Museum finally came out with their until now secret project for the acquisition of a section of the Robin Hood Gardens estate. Anything that happens around Robin Hood Gardens seems to trigger fierce responses and both the involved developer and council are suspicious of any sort of media hick-up around the whole regeneration scheme. For the V&A this was and is a high-risk acquisition because they are criticized from both the radical left and the populist right for their decision. 

Jonathan Meades, the famous journalist, critic, TV maker but most of all magnetic raconteur, the kind you only come across on this side of the pond, completely trashed Richard Rogers and his recent biography A Place for All People in his review for The Guardian. Meades branded Rogers political activism as ‘prosecco socialism’ (mind you not champagne socialism) when he rhetorically stated ‘why the greatest architect of his age, who has campaigned for equality, social housing, lifestyle-size street furniture, improved cities, community communities, multicultural handshake sheds and countless other right-on causes should all but shred his reputation by designing obscenely expensive and very ugly flats is a mystery.

Failure has been one of the most popular words to dismiss post-war modern architecture, especially of the Brutalist kind. Its adversaries claimed it didn’t work, it wouldn’t work; it was even inhuman, plain ugliness propagated by arrogant architects. On the Hunstanton secondary school by the Smithsons some critics keep decrying: “the architects didn’t want any children in the pictures! Shame on them!” As if the Smithsons hadn’t embraced and celebrated children and children’s play as a major inspiration for their work throughout their whole career. 

To return to London in 2017 for a couple of months as a research fellow is quite a reality check. I spent such periods of research in London before, but now that seems like a very different era. This was around 2002-2004 to prepare for the exhibition on the house designs of Alison and Peter Smithson, From the House of the Future to a House of Today, at the Design Museum, a project that I got involved in through my mentor Max Risselada. London was already ridiculously expensive then, maintenance of council housing estates was also bad, even destitute, but no one was talking about urban cleansing or a new class war as people do today.