Brutalism and the Welfare State: Histories of Displacement, 1952-2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract for The Brutalist Turn conference Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel Aviv University, and the Azrieli Architectural Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art 14-16 April, 2019 My presentation will look into the intersections of New Brutalism and welfare state politics, using the case of Alison and Peter Smithson to unpack some of the dominant myths of the period. I will use some of my recent research findings to hypothesize that when looking at the British welfare state system we are not so much looking at a universalist project of citizens’ emancipation but at a continuation of disruptive development at the cost of lower class communities in particular. It was Kenneth Frampton who suggested a direct link between the New Brutalism and the welfare state in his famed Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980, 1985). Yet, the link is not quite substantiated in his 7-page discussion of the architecture of the Smithsons and Stirling and Gowan. I will first contextualize the case of Robin Hood Gardens and demonstrate its rather exceptional qualities, not only in terms of its architecture, but especially in terms of the local council policies, and the larger history of the construction of the London Docklands and its immediate housing districts. Secondly, I will highlight some of the propositions as conceptualized by the Smithsons for the welfare state-architecture nexus, and how they – at first optimistically but also naively – developed their ideas over the years, from the cheerfulness of the House of the Future in 1956 to the pessimism of ‘The Violent Consumer’ in 1974, and from an embracing of the ideas of the Labour politician and Minister for Health and Housing Aneurin Bevan as he put down in his testimonial In Place of Fear (1952), to Team 10’s dismissive discussions of the ‘Labour Union Society’ mid-1970s. My presentation will be concluded with a few observations concerning the afterlife of Robin Hood Gardens, the demise of the British system of planning and housing, and the ruthless metabolism of a ‘superstar city’ like London (Richard Florida, 2017), which devours its own architecture and history in its relentless strife for capitalist hegemony as driven by the speculative logic of global real estate surplus value.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".