Exhibition: Lived Brutalism: Portraits at Robin Hood Gardens

A timely photography exhibition chronicling the lives of Robin Hood Gardens residents in the estate’s last years before demolition.

An iconic ‘Streets in the Sky’ housing scheme, Robin Hood Gardens has been celebrated as a masterpiece of modernism and reviled as a ‘concrete monstrosity’. Yet in such accounts residents’ own voices are rarely heard.

Against these representations and the social-cleansing agenda that they serve, Kois Miah’s photographs chronicle the lives, emotions, and routines that animate this extraordinary council estate.

In Miah’s’ tender images, Brutalism is a living architecture. His portraits show not melancholia for an outmoded social experiment, as council estates are too often portrayed, but a vibrant community cut short by the destruction of regeneration.