The Architecture of the Ordinary: Redefining protection and the role of communities in the future of Brutalist heritage

Abstract

‘All the [houses] I have lived in sit in my ribcage with faces like beggars I dream my postmortem Unzip my skin & ask each [house], what are you: a mother, a sculptor, a motionless meadow? (From ‘Yard’ by Caleb Femi published in ‘Poor’ (2020) This thesis is about Brutalist housing and its heritage as place and community. Notably, considering how they are perceived and managed through terms such as ‘significance and heritage values’ and how this might be developed as part of sustaining them as places to live (English Heritage 2008). Its application is through post-war housing, variously described as Brutalist or Structuralist, considering their qualities as ‘place’ and the roles played by their communities in sustaining them. The study seeks to gain a better understanding of their heritage significance, care and management, which also has wider application for the heritage of other places and communities. Seeing these places as ‘evolving’, forms the basis for reappraisal of ideas around their conservation addressing them as ‘living heritage’, rather than something resigned to the point at which they were completed as architectural works. This requires a reconsideration of contemporary conservation practice and the role played by legislation and legislative protection as much as everyday conservation management and planning. This is developed through examination of the history of conservation to unlock issues in contemporary debate, as well as reviewing the hot topics of Brutalism and community engagement in the Post-war period. The study comprises three resident-led projects – Alexandra Road and Highgate New Town in Camden, London and Vestli in Stovner, East Oslo, all examples of post-war housing. These provide studies for the post-construction histories of these places, the roles played by residents, workers, and visitors and how these communities are situated within their respective built environments. The intention being to illustrate at case study level how heritage as a story reflects collective memories and recollections, informing on identity, culture and the physical environment. Considered together with background research this hopefully informs how to manage that as an evolving resource which is drawn together in the conclusions of the study. At the bottom of which lies an idea of heritage as a living legacy, something which fulfils a societal need to recognise and understand ourselves in terms of community and place. In turn this reaffirms the mandate for conservation, but only so long as conservation continues to provide for that need (English Heritage 2008, Ashford 2011, Tauschek 2015, Farha 2018, Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage 2018, IEMA 2021 etc.). Post-war housing offers something unique in its complex relationship between place and people in flux and also because these projects were ostensibly ‘designed for community’. This is key to considering the ‘Brutalist’ aesthetic/ethic, with notions such as image, honesty, continuity and community discussed in the design of post-war housing. These buildings and places have been lived in and tested by their communities and have futures which are to some degree dependent on the engagement of those communities. Two explicit decisions were made at the outset of the study. The first being not to work with communities under severe threat, but rather focus on the ‘everyday’ of three post-war housing examples. The second concerns a problematic attempt to characterise the overall narrative of the stories from the communities in the case studies and not to record individual stories in detail. The aim being not to subjugate community to conservation but to understand how conservation can better serve those communities by drawing the focus onto narratives of them as living places. The study concludes with direct recommendations for post-war housing and its communities and a critique of current practice and methods, by which we might better our approach to conservation. It seeks to,

• Explore, analyse and make recommendations (to improve practice) about communal heritage values in conservation and with that the use of legislation and designation, drawing specifically on the post-war heritage of the case-studies, • Characterise Brutalism as a movement in terms of the case studies and develop an understanding from that which can be used in its conservation, • Present the case studies as a resource for further study, casework and the development of participatory method.