"SLUMS IN THE SKY: HOW PHOTOGRAPHY KILLED THE DESIRE FOR
MID-CENTURY, URBAN SOCIAL HOUSING"
MID-CENTURY, URBAN SOCIAL HOUSING"
ABSTRACT: On its face, Nigel Henderson’s (1917–85) postwar street photography would appear to have little to do with the development of Brutalism under Alison (1928–93) and Peter (1923–2003) Smithson. However, Henderson’s photography, highlighting as it did the significance of human relationships in underserved communities, was foundational to the design of British social housing. Rebelling against first-generation modernists, architects like the Smithsons embraced a more fundamentally humanist position, using photography as a kind of ethnography in their design processes. Through innovative projects like Robin Hood Gardens (1972) they attempted to preserve rather than reshape working-class culture, guarding against threats posed by progress and urban redevelopment.
Buoyed by a new kind of utopian optimism, the Smithsons and their contemporaries reimagined Postwar housing through a radically brutalist style and ethos. Yet within decades, the movement grew increasingly threatened by the demise of municipal support, the promises of home ownership and by the movement’s own disastrous failures. As once-exciting developments descended into “sink estates” for Britain’s poorest, even the Smithsons lost their nerve.
With the circulation of the explosive demolition of Missouri’s failed Pruitt-Igoe Apartments (1955) in 1972, the experiment of living better together began its swift descent.
This dissertation takes as its central premise that photography was ultimately deleterious to the movement for housing equity, following in familiar furrows of critical photojournalism which blamed architecture and not economic systems for the existence of slums. Looking to the so-called “rise and fall” of brutalist social housing in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the ways in which photography shaped the housing discourse will be discussed and evaluated. In so doing, I argue we can reframe the housing question by holding to account those officials and systems that are responsible for housing insecurity. Just as photographs may have killed a movement for better housing, they may also renew that interest.
Buoyed by a new kind of utopian optimism, the Smithsons and their contemporaries reimagined Postwar housing through a radically brutalist style and ethos. Yet within decades, the movement grew increasingly threatened by the demise of municipal support, the promises of home ownership and by the movement’s own disastrous failures. As once-exciting developments descended into “sink estates” for Britain’s poorest, even the Smithsons lost their nerve.
With the circulation of the explosive demolition of Missouri’s failed Pruitt-Igoe Apartments (1955) in 1972, the experiment of living better together began its swift descent.
This dissertation takes as its central premise that photography was ultimately deleterious to the movement for housing equity, following in familiar furrows of critical photojournalism which blamed architecture and not economic systems for the existence of slums. Looking to the so-called “rise and fall” of brutalist social housing in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the ways in which photography shaped the housing discourse will be discussed and evaluated. In so doing, I argue we can reframe the housing question by holding to account those officials and systems that are responsible for housing insecurity. Just as photographs may have killed a movement for better housing, they may also renew that interest.
