Architecture on Film: Robin Hood Gardens + The Smithsons on Housing + Q&A

Misunderstood masterpiece? Well-intentioned failure? A critical exploration of the Smithson’s controversial London housing estate, Robin Hood Gardens, as it faces demolition. A reflection on the legacy of one of the 20th century’s most contested and emblematic buildings – from the time of its conception to its afterlife – across two films separated by the building’s lifecycle of 50 years.


Followed by a ScreenTalk with directors Thomas Beyer and Adrian Dorschner, chaired by Ellis Woodman (Director, Architecture Foundation).

The Smithsons on Housing
(UK, 1970, B.S. Johnson, 28 mins)

Introduced as ‘virtually the only British architects to have an international reputation’, this extensive BBC interview with Alison and Peter Smithson – at the time of Robin Hood Garden’s construction – frames the project’s genesis, ambition and contextual reality, alongside the architects’ hopes and fears for it, their profession, and London.

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Robin Hood Gardens [UK Premiere]
(Germany, 2022, Thomas Beyer, Adrian Dorschner, 90 mins)

50 years after its completion in 1972, Beyer & Dorschner’s documentary maps the legacy of the housing estate through a multitude of present-day interviews, perspectives and observations.

From critics and architects including Charles Jencks, Richard Rodgers, Denise Scott Brown, Liza Fior and Adam Caruso, to the estate’s final residents, the architect’s children, sociologist Jane Darke (whose PhD thesis documented the responses of the first residents’ to their building), and photographer Hélène Binet as she captures the estate ahead of its destruction.

A nuanced discussion of the limits of architecture’s capacity to be an agent of social good, and the complexities of the Modernist project, charting the contradictions between internal and external factors, dreams and realities, and the forces that lead to a building being both demolished and exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, simultaneously.