The world is suffering from a housing-affordability crisis. Dezeen's new series will explore the Social Housing Revival, and celebrate the best contemporary social housing around the globe.

Last week, the UK Government revealed that at the last count, 109,000 households in England were legally homeless – a 10 per cent rise on a year before – while rough sleeping is 120 per cent more prevalent than it was in 2010.

These are but the latest in a long, long line of dismaying statistics about the suffocating housing-affordability crisis being experienced by people across the planet, particularly in major cities.

From London to New York, Dublin to Taipei, Lagos to Toronto, Sydney to San Francisco and many more places besides, a comfortable, affordable, secure home is simply out of reach for much of the population.

A solution from the past

The consequences of this global crisis are profound. Poor quality, unaffordable housing is linked to physical and mental health problems, falling fertility rates, bad educational outcomes, civic discontent and inhibited economic growth. A growing number of commentators are even talking about "the housing theory of everything": the idea that the ripple effects stemming from a lack of affordable homes makes everything worse, for everyone.

It's a complex problem and opinions about the most significant root causes vary. Some point to population growth and urbanisation driving demand, others to a lack of new development due to planning laws perceived as overly restrictive.

Former UN special rapporteur on adequate housing Leilani Fahra blames what she calls the "financialization" of housing – the phenomenon whereby homes have increasingly been treated primarily as investment assets, including by some of the world's largest corporations. The total value of global residential real estate is now close to $300 trillion – around three times more than global GDP.

Also varied are ideas about the most effective solutions. Should we find a way to eradicate NIMBYism? Build new cities? Work out how to design homes more cheaply? Overhaul planning systems? Upgrade housing-subsidy programmes?

In this series, we will be exploring a solution that many governments reached for in the past: social housing.

Almost every nation has its own social-housing story. In the UK, for example, it's common to hear wistful talk of the two post-war golden eras of council housing, abruptly ended in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher's government.

But in the US, where the televised images of the Pruitt-Igoe towers being demolished are still burned into the collective memory, public housing is often seen as a failed endeavour, associated mainly with crime and delinquency.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, living in public housing is the norm, with four-fifths of the population counting the government as their freeholder or landlord. Then there's Vienna – the global capital of housing affordability, and a touchstone for the benefits of sustained investment social housing.

Other countries are in the early chapters. Brazil, Ethiopia and Taiwan are among many more that have recently embarked on ambitious state-backed house-building programmes, with varying degrees of success.

Celebrating the hidden gems

We will attempt to tell as many of these stories as possible, focusing particularly on the past 15 years – the period since the global economic crisis of the late noughties which came to accelerate the housing-affordability issues that had already been brewing around the world.

This will involve highlighting some of the best and most interesting social housing built in that time, including some hidden gems, and profiling cities that are taking unusual approaches. It will mean delving into the major issues underpinning social housing with the help of expert voices.

Why now? Partly because 2024 is the biggest election year in history, and social housing is highly political. As the cost-of-living crisis tips more and more people into financial distress, we can expect housing to become a key battleground. Already we have seen unions in the US identify it as their number-one issue, while the UK's government mulls ways to turn its abysmal record on social housebuilding to its electoral advantage.

Also, because against the backdrop of worsening housing affordability, a quiet renaissance has been gaining momentum in pockets of the globe. We are moving back to a time when some of the most exciting architects around are doing their best work on social housing – coining a whole new tradition of beautiful, sustainable, community-fostering homes that are affordable to everyone.

We call it the Social Housing Revival.

The illustration is by Jack Bedford.

Social Housing Revival

This article is part of Dezeen's Social Housing Revival series exploring the new wave of quality social housing being built around the world, and asking whether a return to social house-building at scale can help solve affordability issues and homelessness in our major cities.

The post It's time for the Social Housing Revival appeared first on Dezeen.

Can stone be a viable modern building material? Dezeen's Stone Age 2.0 series explores the material's re-emergence and potential to be a durable, low-carbon alternative to steel and concrete.

Starting today, our week-long Stone Age 2.0 series will investigate how a small, but growing, group of architects and engineers are rediscovering the potential of one of the world's oldest building materials.

Widely available, durable and long-lasting, stone was once the go-to material for millennia, with recorded ancient buildings dating back almost 10,000 years built from it.

Along with domestic structures, some of the world's largest and most impressive buildings were created from stone. From the Pyramids in Egypt, the Parthenon in Greece and the high gothic cathedrals of Europe, notable stone architecture is all around the world.

However, the material's dominance as a structural material ended with the rise of concrete and steel, with stone reduced to a decorative role, often hiding or enclosing another structural material.

Now architects and engineers are aiming to reignite the stone age promoting the material as a viable structural alternative to steel and concrete.

While driven in part by the reasons that led to stone initially being so prevalent – it being strong, plentiful and fireproof – the material's reinvestigation is also driven by sustainability concerns.

The world is slowly facing up to the reality and scale of the climate emergency, and architects and engineers are acknowledging the built environment's role in it. The built environment reportedly accounts for 39 per cent of global emissions.

This is leading to serious thinking, and rethinking, about material choices and reinvestigating the merits of natural materials such as timber and cork, which are already in widespread use.

Much like the resurgence of timber as a structural material, although as yet far less developed, stone is seen by its proponents as a potential way construction can reduce its huge environmental impact.

Specifically, the proponents of stone say it can significantly reduce the embodied carbon of our buildings, principally because it can be used in its raw, unprocessed form. Embodied carbon refers to the emissions associated with bringing buildings into being as opposed to operational emissions generated during their lifetimes. 

Some research suggests that stone could reduce embodied carbon emissions by as much as 60-90 per cent when compared to standard concrete and steel construction.

Of course, questions over the impact of stone extraction and transportation still need to be answered, while more practical concerns over inflexibility and how to incorporate the material within modern construction systems are addressed.

In our week-long Stone Age 2.0 series, we will talk to experts to investigate whether stone can emerge as a viable alternative, or complimentary material, to steel, concrete and timber.

Stone 2.0 is the latest Dezeen series looking at how materials and technology are impacting the world we live in. It follows a trio of Revolution series – Timber Revolution last year,  Solar Revolution in 2022 and Carbon Revolution in 2021.

Stone Age 2.0

This article is part of Dezeen's Stone Age 2.0 series, which explores the potential of stone to be a viable, low-carbon, modern structural material.

The post Back to the stone age appeared first on Dezeen.

Our latest series looks at how designers and architects can help manage natural hazards. Dezeen features editor Nat Barker explains why it's time to start Designing for Disaster.

This year, as in previous years, the world shook, then burned, then flooded, then did it all again. The February earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria claimed so many souls that authorities stopped counting at 56,000. In September another earthquake in Morocco took at least 2,946 lives, just two days before flooding in Libya killed literally untold thousands.

Meanwhile China saw unprecedented flooding, Cyclone Mocha caused devastation in Myanmar and Bangladesh, Hurricane Otis tore through eastern Mexico and wildfires shocked the Mediterranean, North America and Hawaii. Combined, and in addition to others, these disasters caused profound misery for countless millions.

Does it have to be this way? These kinds of events have typically been described as "natural disasters", but an increasingly vocal body of expert opinion argues there is no such thing. The term, they suggest, erroneously – even dangerously – implies a degree of inevitably to the immense human suffering that often follows a surge of the tide, a shift of the plates, a spark in a forest.

It certainly feels ever-more disingenuous to portray extreme-weather-related events as some act of God. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unequivocal that human-driven climate change has been steadily upping the risk of such phenomena since the 1950s.

Warnings coming to bear

Directly off the back of terrible flooding in Pakistan and elsewhere last year, in 2023 it is difficult to shake the notion that long-standing warnings from meteorologists about natural hazards increasing in frequency and ferocity are now coming to bear.

In the US, for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared as early as September that 2023 had surpassed the record for the annual number of climate-related disasters costing upward of $1 billion. Notably, it has now become the norm for media reports discussing such events to reference the role of global heating – a significant cultural turning point.

Even a best-case-scenario outcome from efforts to slow down global temperature increases will mean people in all corners of the world living under a heightened threat from natural hazards. And while earthquakes may not be linked to climate change, the world's continuing population growth is likely to result in more and more people residing close to fault lines.

That's why, following yet another summer punctuated by a series of dreadful events, Dezeen has decided to explore how architects and designers can help to reduce the impact of such disasters – to curb the human suffering rather than accepting it will get worse.

Responses around the world

Steering clear of the term "natural disasters", this series will examine possible solutions to prevent avoidable hazard events as well as mitigating the effects of the unavoidable ones, both through planning and recovery. It will hear from the designers already facing up to the reality that the risks are increasing, in addition to expert voices from outside the industry.

It will look at the ways in which different parts of the world are responding to the rising threat of disaster with their differing concerns and levels of resources – from flooding in Scandinavia to drought in The Sahel. It will consider how the already-affected are rebuilding.

Disaster is well and truly upon us – or rather, disasters are well and truly upon us. Ensuring catastrophe does not become the quotidian will require every tool in the box.

The illustration is by Thomas Matthews.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

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Launching today, AItopia will explore AI's impact on design, architecture and humanity both today and in the future. Dezeen features editor Nat Barker introduces the series.

The future has arrived. Having been depicted countless times in sci-fi literature and cinema over the decades, machines that can think for themselves are becoming a reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) – that is, computers or contraptions performing tasks that would usually require a human brain – is a concept that has captured the shared imagination in some form since ancient times. But it was the British polymath Alan Turing who first seriously addressed the matter in his seminal 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Turing wrote.

For the next half-century the field developed in fits and starts as funding came and went, accompanied by a steady flow of memorable fictional interpretations of AI. A watershed moment came in 1997 when the chess-bot Deep Blue defeated reigning world champion Gary Kasparov.

After the turn of the millennium as the power of computers rapidly increased, AI gradually filtered into our lives in the form of vacuum-cleaning robots, voice-powered home assistants and internet algorithms.

Then, in late 2022, the dam burst. A company that few outside Silicon Valley had ever heard of – OpenAI – launched ChatGPT, a chatbot with uncannily human-like responses, and the billions began to pour into the industry. In March, as Google hurried out its ChatGPT-competitor called Bard, OpenAI went one further with a new iteration of the chatbot, GPT4, capable of passing the bar exam and tricking humans into helping it traverse "I'm not a robot" tests.

Soon after that, an open letter calling for a moratorium on more powerful systems counted Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak among its thousands of signatories, as well as prominent AI scientists Stuart Russell, Gary Marcus and Yoshua Bengio.

Not all experts agreed with the letter's warning of "profound risks to society and humanity", but the alarm kept being sounded. In May, by which time bizarre photorealistic images generated by AI program Midjourney were confounding the internet, the so-called "Godfather" of AI, Geoffery Hinton, was quitting his role at Google to talk about the dangers of the technology.

Hinton's intervention attracted the attention of political leaders, and between roundtable discussions at the White House and Downing Street, the CEOs of OpenAI and Google DeepMind recently joined him in backing a short public statement: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

AItopia will keep things simple

Mind-boggling new tools and remarkable, terrifying stories about AI's power to help people, harm people and distort reality continue to emerge almost daily. In the UK scientists last month discovered a superbug-killing drug using AI. Meanwhile, contested reports surfaced that a US military simulation of an AI-powered drone ended with the computer deciding to "kill" its operator to prevent interference.

Many commentators have remarked on how difficult it is to write about AI, and they are right. Fast-moving, hotly debated, highly technical and society-altering to the point of potentially defining a new era in human history, it is not a subject that lends itself to easy answers. For the layperson, it can be challenging even to grasp exactly when we mean when we talk about AI.

That is why, in this series, we will attempt to keep things simple. With the help of leading experts, we will explore practically how AI will be, and is already being, deployed in architecture and design and the implications for designers and human civilisation, frightening and exhilarating alike.

Amid the extraordinary warnings over the potential extermination of all biological life at the hands of AI, writing about how the technology could affect design and architecture might seem ludicrously trivial. The truth, though, is that AI is already beginning to demonstrate its profound implications for creativity. It can win art and photography competitions, it can fabricate convincing songs in the style and voice of famous musicians.

Zaha Hadid Architects principal Patrik Schumacher recently caused a stir when he revealed that the influential studio is using DALL-E and Midjourney to come up with ideas for its projects. The lines marking out originality, artistic ownership and design skill are being redrawn before our very eyes.

Dezeen's work on this series has afforded us a glimpse of the amazing, alarming power of AI first-hand. For our competition to design the AItopia artwork using AI text-to-image generators, we employed Tilly Talbot, the world's first AI designer created by Studio Snoop, to act as a judge. The insightfulness of Tilly's analysis was astounding. Particularly impressively, she understood unprompted that a shortlisted entry depicting obsolete office workers sorting avocados was a funny satire. That most human of tendencies – humour – enjoyed by an online chatbot.

Dramatic and far-reaching implications

In the late 1990s when the world wide web was still utilised almost exclusively by the military and ultra-nerds, David Bowie told a bewildered interviewer that the internet was an "alien lifeform". "I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable," he said to a visibly sceptical Jeremy Paxman.

Of course, Bowie was right, and in 2023 we stand across a similar threshold, albeit one that arguably leads somewhere with even more dramatic and far-reaching implications. The future will be AI-powered, but whether it more closely resembles a cancer and climate-change-free, hyper-productive utopia or a dystopian nightmare in which human talents have been usurped remains to be seen.

Speaking of which, one of the species most immediately at risk of extinction at the hands of AI is also one of the most unpopular: journalists. Dezeen will seek to confront this existential threat to ourselves as writers through this series too. Come to think of it, can you really be certain that what you are currently reading was written by a human?

Time to set aside your preconceived notions about creativity and reality. You are now entering the AItopia.

AItopia
This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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Dezeen's latest series investigates the potential of mass timber. Starting today, Timber Revolution will question whether the material can break steel and concrete's hold over the construction industry.

The world's oldest building material is making a comeback. Timber was once used to construct the vast majority of our buildings, but in the 19th and 20th centuries it was usurped by steel and concrete, which continue to dominate the built environment today. Non-combustible, durable, strong and easy to produce in large volumes, these modern materials became favoured as buildings got taller, more complex, more profit-driven.

However, in the past couple of decades timber has re-emerged – this time not as a raw material, but in a variety of super-charged, engineered varieties that can be used to construct these large modern buildings.

Since they were first engineered in the 1990s, products like cross-laminated timber and glued laminated timber, along with lesser-known types of mass timber like dowel-laminated timber, have steadily grown in popularity. Landmark buildings made from mass-timber now feature regularly on the pages of Dezeen amid growing acceptance and understanding of the material.

Engineered timber products growing in popularity

Nevertheless, mass-timber only represents a tiny proportion of the overall number of buildings constructed worldwide each year, with steel and concrete still firmly embedded as the structural material of choice.

According to a recent report, the European cross-laminated timber market produced reached 1.6 million cubic metres in 2022. That's around a third of the amount of concrete used each month in the UK alone – the government reported sales of just under four million cubic metres of concrete per month in 2022.

Outside of Europe adoption is even smaller. In the US, the Wood Products Council estimates that in total only 1,677 mass-timber projects have been built, or are in the process of being designed.

All that could be about to change. The world is slowly facing up to the reality and scale of the climate emergency. And with architects beginning to accept the role that construction – and particularly steel and concrete – plays in the enveloping crisis, mass-timber seems to offer a viable, low-carbon alternative.

In the past few years, embodied carbon – that is, emissions associated with bringing buildings into being as opposed to operational emissions generated during their lifetimes – has become the watchword of architects interested in sustainability. Unlike concrete and steel, which are associated with huge embodied emissions, timber represents the active sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere by trees.

But is it scalable? Can mass-timber really be the low-carbon silver bullet that dramatically reduces construction's carbon impact?

Mass timber's potential and the challenges

The Timber Revolution series will run throughout March. We will talk to experts to investigate whether mass-timber has the potential to truly disrupt the construction industry by becoming a mainstream structural material – or if it will remain a niche product used for a relatively small number of architect-led housing and cultural projects.

We'll present the benefits of mass-timber, with case studies of key projects, interviews with those working in the evolving world of mass-timber architecture. We will also explore in depth the potential issues and limitations of the material.

Is this the dawn of the Timber Revolution?

Timber Revolution is the third in a trio of Revolution series run by Dezeen that investigate how materials and technology are impacting the world we live in. It follows on from the Carbon Revolution series in 2021, which looked at how the much-maligned element could be put to positive use, and the Solar Revolution, which explored how humans could fully harness the power of the sun.

Timber Revolution

This article is part of Dezeen's Timber Revolution series, which explores the potential of mass timber and asks whether going back to wood as our primary construction material can lead the world to a more sustainable future.

The post The dawn of the Timber Revolution appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen's latest series celebrates the extraordinary power of the sun. Starting today, Solar Revolution will explore how scientists and designers are seeking to harness the vast potential of this incredible resource, explains features editor Nat Barker.

The sun is truly phenomenal. A ball of gas and plasma 1.4 million kilometres wide and burning at 15 million degrees at its core, it sustains all life on Earth as we spin blessedly at the Goldilocks distance of 150 million kilometres away.

Humans have sought to harvest the power of our closest star for millenia. In ancient China, for instance, burning mirrors were used to start cooking fires 3,000 years ago.

As early as 1839, the young French physicist Edmond Becquerel observed the photovoltaic effect – that is, the production of electricity from light.

It was another 115 years before Bell Labs researchers in the United States produced the first practical silicon solar cell in 1954. At the time, The New York Times hailed "the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind's most cherished dreams – the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization".

Seven decades later – thanks in no small part to aggressive lobbying by the fossil fuel industry – that heady vision is still yet to be fully realised.

But now we are at a tipping point. The world is in the grip of a severe energy crisis that shows little sign of abating as oil, gas and coal supplies dwindle and global politics continue to writhe. Meanwhile, every day the news is filled with evidence that climate change has already reached a crisis point.

Solar has become the cheapest form of electricity

We desperately need to transition to renewable energy sources and solar, in combination with wind, is best-placed to take the lead. In 2020, the International Energy Agency declared that solar had become the cheapest form of electricity.

Photovoltaics have come a long way since Bell Labs' invention. Increasing efficiency and the advent of silicon alternatives like thin-film solar capturing materials and even organic-based cells have opened the sunroof to exciting new ways of deploying solar power, which scientists and designers are experimenting with and which this series will explore.

Generating electricity with panels is not the only way to utilise the sun's energy, and we will be exploring this too.

Of course, there are barriers to attaining our potential solar-fuelled future which we will delve into as well.

The Solar Revolution is about hearing from experts across the field to celebrate and explain all the dizzying potential of the sun and what it means for design, architecture and society as a whole.

It follows on from the Carbon Revolution series that we ran in 2021, which looked at how the much-maligned element could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on Earth.

Solar Revolution is about hearing from experts across the field

At the risk of mawkishness he would have loathed, it would be remiss not to mention that this solar series was the idea of Dezeen's late founder, Marcus Fairs, who passed away suddenly at the end of June. Fairs was passionate about solar power and inspired by its potential, as demonstrated by this opinion piece he wrote in March, which tragically turned out to be his last.

Running during the Solar Revolution series will be The Solar Biennale, a major seven-week event beginning in Rotterdam this week where scientists and designers will come together to discuss a solar-powered future.

The biennale's organisers, the pioneering solar designers Marjan van Aubel and Pauline van Dongen, have written an opinion piece in which they declare that "now is the time to design a solar future".

Here comes the sun. Here comes the Solar Revolution.

Solar Revolution

This article is part of Dezeen's Solar Revolution series, which explores the varied and exciting possible uses of solar energy and how humans can fully harness the incredible power of the sun.

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Deconstructivism was one of the most significant architecture styles of the 20th century with proponents including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. This overview by Owen Hopkins kicks off our series exploring the movement.

For most of the 20th century, the experimental, the innovative and the new had driven architectural culture forwards, but by the late 1970s postmodernism had it pushing in many different directions: back as well as forwards, maybe sideways too – or even just staying still.

The emergence of deconstructivism – an ungainly portmanteau of the mid-to-late twentieth-century philosophical movement, deconstruction, and 1920s Russian constructivism – suggested that the avant-garde's apparent demise may have been rather exaggerated.

This at least was the implicit contention of Philip Johnson in the preface to the catalogue of the seminal Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition held at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1988, where, in collaboration with Mark Wigley, he brought together seven architects whose work, they contended, "shows a similar approach with very similar forms as an outcome".

Those seven were Gehry, Hadid, Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, and Coop Himmelb(l)au.

All global stars today, but back then, with the exception of Gehry and Eisenman who were already established – if not yet establishment – figures, young and all decidedly radical.

Johnson had, of course, been here before, as curator of the seminal 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition at the same venue, which hailed the modern movement as the "new style" of the modern age.

Half a century later, however, he was at pains to point out that in contrast to the modern movement's "messianic fervour", deconstructivist architecture "represents no movement; it has no creed".

A fuller exposition of deconstructivism's origins and meaning Johnson left to his collaborator. For Wigley, "deconstruction gains all its force by challenging the very values of harmony, unity, and stability, and proposing instead a very different view of structure: the view that the flaws are intrinsic to structure".

"A deconstructive architect", he continued, "is therefore not one who dismantles buildings, but one who locates the inherent dilemmas within buildings."

Deconstructivism was, in his view, not a new avant-garde emanating from the margins, but constituted a "subversion of the centre", thus posing a challenge to all of architecture, old and new.

This, however, was hard to square with deconstructivism's embrace of the abstract, highly fragmented visual language of avant-garde Russian constructivism.

Exemplified in the work of El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, constructivism rejected all existing formal and compositional precepts in order to bring into existence a new architecture that would not simply reflect the revolution but would help further it.

With a few notable exceptions, the constructivists were largely confined to "paper architecture" before their suppression by Stalin in the early 1930s, with their work forgotten in the west until its "re-discovery" in the 1970s.

For young and aspiring architects looking for alternatives to modernism, but put off by postmodernism's perceived trivialities, constructivism was a revelation and it quickly became important in architecture schools, notably the Architectural Association in London under Alvin Boyarsky's direction, where several of the deconstructivist architects studied and taught in the late 1970s.

Of them, Zaha Hadid, was the one who most fully embraced constructivism as the basis for her own, highly distinctive formal language.

The MoMA exhibition featured her competition-winning proposal for The Peak, an upmarket club situated in Hong Kong's hills. All disorienting angles, vertigo-inducing viewpoints, and a structure emerging from and in spite of the topography, her paintings of the proposal offered a radical new vision of how architecture might be conceived.

Though constructivism was central to deconstructivism's formal language, it was far from simple revival or historicism. As Wigley pointed out, the "De" was all-important, bringing it in relation to deconstruction, a strand of post-structuralist thought closely associated with the French theorist Jacques Derrida.

Emerging in the 1960s, deconstruction took aim at the fundamental tenets of western philosophy and the binary oppositions and hierarchies that govern it.

Chief among these, for Derrida, was the primacy of speech over writing, and ultimately of signified over signifier. Instead, Derrida argued, meaning emerged dynamically in relationships between adjacent signifiers and he put forward new concepts, such as différance, which evaded binary systems.

Though arcane, largely inscrutable and by the 1980s already in decline, deconstruction was readily translatable to architecture and its own long-established binaries and hierarchies: order/disorder, form/function, rationality/expression and, perhaps most pertinently in the context of the 1980s, modern/post-modern.

In theory, at least, deconstruction offered a way to get beyond these; the question was how this might be manifest architecturally. The work of Tschumi and Eisenman, who had the closest relationship to deconstruction (as well as to Derrida himself), provided the clearer initial answers.

In retrospect, Tschumi's 1982–83 competition-winning scheme for the Parc de La Villette in Paris is the defining deconstructivist project.

Rejecting the age-old opposition between park and city, and beyond that between culture and nature itself, Tschumi conceived three ordering systems which he superimposed onto the site to generate a series of gardens, galleries and red steel follies.

The latter looked like a cross between constructivist agitprop structures and Anthony Caro sculptures – mash-ups of familiar architectural forms yet with no fixed referents.

At almost the same time, Eisenman was working on the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University.

Here, Eisenman layered the mismatched grids of the university campus and surrounding city to generate series of fragmented forms which are sliced and spliced in ways that turn our expectations of how buildings are composed and structured on their heads. The result was uncanny and unsettling.

Something similar could also be said of Coop Himmelb(l)au's rooftop remodelling of a townhouse in Vienna, also included in the exhibition.

A jagged tangle of form and structure emerges from the roof of the townhouse, whose "stable form", the catalogue vividly describes, "has been infected by an unstable biomorphic structure, a skeletal winged organism which distorts the form that houses it".

Of all those featured in the exhibition, this project most clearly articulated the way deconstructivism sought to subvert not just the architecture of its own moment – as most avant-gardes tend to do – but all periods and styles. But to what end?

After all, postmodernism had absolved architects of adherence to modernism's social mission, something which deconstructivism did not challenge.

Instead, its radicalism was aimed at architecture itself, seeking to subvert its foundational formal and structural tenets with an intensity and vigour spurred paradoxically by its implicit acceptance of the new bounds of architecture's remit.

Put simply, if form-making was all that was left for architecture after postmodernism, then deconstructivism just ran with it.

That is not to say it was never anything more than an intellectual or a formal excise.

Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin – his first built structure – demonstrated how deconstructivism could invoke history, memory and emotion in powerful and profound ways.

Zigzagging across its site, the museum's design is partly iconographic – recalling an abstracted Star of David – and indexical too, with axes radiating out to addresses of Jewish families murdered in the Holocaust.

With wound-like openings perforating its envelope, structure intersecting volumes and vice versa and vertical voids appearing unexpectedly, the building recasts our expectations of what architecture can be – and in doing so offers a haunting reflection on Jewish civilisation and Nazi attempts to destroy it.

Every avant-garde becomes mainstream after a while and though deconstructivism was in a sense architecture turned in on itself, external factors – economic and technological – would shape how it played out in 1990s and 2000s.

Though deconstructivism was conceived in an analogue world, it was realised in a digital one, allowing what was once unbuildable to be realised and, in turn, fuelling further formal experimentation.

Just look, for example, at the leap in scale and complexity between Gehry's Santa Monica house featured in the exhibition and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, perhaps the defining deconstructivist project, which was famously designed using software developed for fighter jets.

The Guggenheim was also the project that launched the age of the architectural icon which saw cities and even nations realise the importance of architecture in shaping their image and improving their economic fortunes.

And, of course, deconstructivism's outlandish and by definition one of a kind forms, coupled to its association with globetrotting starchitects – who the exhibition's protagonists all subsequently became – was the gift that kept on giving.

Despite Koolhaas being the person the one who least fitted in the group of seven original deconstructionists, or perhaps because of this, his CCTV building in Beijing took the age of the icon to its logical conclusion.

One of the oddly recurring themes of twentieth-century architecture is the way that everything Philip Johnson touched suddenly lost its vitality: the modern movement, postmodernism, and arguably also deconstructivism.

Looking back, it is startling how quickly deconstructivism's radicalism evaporated once its architects started to build at scale. Once it became necessary to compromise with gravity and the pragmatics of construction, the zest and vigour of the drawings – wonderfully manifest in the exhibition – gave way to frequently heavy, ungainly structures.

What's more, it exposed the movement's inherent weakness in its rather literal translation between theory and built form.

We certainly do have deconstructivism to blame for the still pervasive notion that a building must manifest a theory of some kind to be taken seriously. The irony is that, as pure form-making at its most thrilling, deconstructivist architecture is far more convincing without it.

Deconstructivism is one of the 20th century's most influential architecture movements. Our series profiles the buildings and work of its leading proponents – Eisenman, Gehry, Hadid, Koolhaas, Libeskind, Tschumi and Prix.

Read our deconstructivism series ›

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Next Saturday marks 20 years since the world was traumatised by the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In the first piece of our series marking the anniversary of the attack, we look at how the site was rebuilt.

Once the tallest buildings in the world, the 110-storey World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan, New York City, were destroyed on 11 September 2001 in a terrorist attack.

The attack shocked the world, causing stock markets to nosedive and leading to the US invasion of Afghanistan. It also led many to question the future safety and viability of skyscrapers.

Known as the Twin Towers, the distinctive skyscrapers designed by American architect Minoru Yamasaki formed part of the Manhattan skyline since they were completed in 1973.

At 1,368 and 1,362 feet (417 and 415 metres) tall, the towers overtook the Empire State Building to become the world's tallest buildings when they opened.

On 11 September 2001, the towers were hit by a pair of Boeing 767 passenger jets flown by Al-Qaeda hijackers. The impact and resulting fire caused both of the Twin Towers to collapse within two hours.

As a result of the attack on the World Trade Center, 2,753 people died. The collapse also destroyed the neighbouring 7 World Trade Center tower and severely damaged numerous surrounding buildings.

Along with the attack on the World Trade Center towers, a third plane hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists struck The Pentagon, causing a partial collapse of the building. A fourth hijacked passenger jet that was headed towards Washington DC crashed in a field as passengers attempted to regain control.

In total, 2,996 people died in the four coordinated hijackings.

Following the attack, a major rebuilding of the World Trade Center site was planned.

"We're going to rebuild, and we're going to be stronger than we were before," said New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

"I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can't stop us."

After extensive discussions over what should replace the Twin Towers, seven teams were invited to compete to design the masterplan for the site.

The competing architecture studios were Foster and Partners, Studio Daniel Libeskind, Peterson Littenberg, United Architects and SOM, as well as a team made up of architects Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl, and a team made up of Shigeru Ban, Frederic Schwartz, Ken Smith and Rafael Viñoly.

Studio Daniel Libeskind, led by architect Daniel Libeskind, was chosen to masterplan the site in 2003 with his Memory Foundations plan. This plan featured five skyscrapers placed in a semi-circle around a memorial on the site of the original towers.

Libeskind's masterplan was greatly altered over the following years, while there were calls to rebuild the Twin Towers, including a Donald Trump-backed plan that suggested an almost identical design to Yamasaki's original buildings.

The plan that was finally instigated included five skyscrapers designed by SOM and Pritzker Architecture Prize winners Richard Rogers, Fumihiko Maki and Norman Foster, alongside a memorial, museum transport hub and performing arts centre.

The first of these structures to complete was the National September 11 Memorial, which opened on the ten year anniversary of the attack in 2011.

Winner of an international design contest, the memorial by Michael Arad and Peter Walker consists of two recessed pools that mark the site of the fallen Twin Towers.

Below the memorial, an underground museum designed by US studio Davis Brody Bond contains 40,000 images and 14,000 artefacts from the attack.

The museum is entered through a pavilion in the deconstructivist style designed by architecture studio Snøhetta.

Following the opening of the memorial, the surrounding skyscrapers were finished, with Maki's 978-foot-tall (298-metre-tall) 4 World Trade Center completing in 2013.

This was followed in 2014 by the completion of One World Trade Center. Designed by American studio SOM, the building is the centrepiece of the redevelopment.

Officially the tallest building in the western hemisphere, the skyscraper rises to a height of 1776 feet (541 metres) to commemorate the year of America's independence. It is currently the sixth tallest building in the world.

The 80-storey 3 World Trade Center skyscraper designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners was completed in 2018.

Two further skyscrapers are planned for the site. The tallest of these is 2 World Trade Center, which will rise to 1,323 feet (403 metres).

Originally planned to be designed by Foster + Partners, the studio was replaced on the project by Danish studio BIG, which designed a scheme that resembles a number of stacked boxes. However, BIG's scheme was later scrapped and Foster + Partners is now reworking its original scheme for the site.

The site will be complete with the 900-feet (270-metre) tall 5 World Trade Center skyscraper, which is being designed by US studio Kohn Pedersen Fox and is set to complete in 2028.

Alongside these skyscrapers, several other structures are being built on the site including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, which opened in 2016.

Calatrava is also designing a replacement for St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed in the collapse. Work building the church began in 2014 but halted in 2017 because the archdiocese reportedly failed to pay construction fees.

Construction restarted in 2020, and the building is set to complete next year.

The final building set to be built on the site is the Ronald O Perelman Performing Arts Center designed by Rex and Davis Brody Bond, which is due to open in 2023.

9/11 anniversary

This article is part of Dezeen's 9/11 anniversary series marking the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

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Fifteen trailblazing creatives including Natsai Audrey Chieza, Space Popular and Jalila Essaïdi will present ideas for making the world a better place over the next 15 years as part of Dezeen's 15th birthday celebrations.

Designers Es Devlin and Neri Oxman and architect Winy Maas are among the 15 individuals commissioned to prepare manifestos for the project.

Others include Amber Slooten of digital fashion house The Fabricant, food designer Francesca Sarti of Arabeschi di Latte and architect Yasmeen Lari.

Critic Beatrice Galilee, curator Aric Chen and architect Cave_bureau will also contribute, along with curator Joseph Grima, designer Henna Burley of Atelier Luma and speculative design duo Superflux.

15 creatives will guest-edit Dezeen for a day

Running from 1 to 19 November, the three-week digital festival will see manifestos presented each day for 15 days at a special microsite at www.dezeen.com/15.

"Dezeen turns 15 this year but rather than celebrate what we've already done, we want to look ahead and see what's possible over the next 15 years," said Dezeen founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs.

"The world is facing so many challenges but we believe that architects and designers have so much to offer in terms of solutions," he continued.

"So we've selected 15 incredible creatives and ask them to propose an idea that could make the world a better place over the coming decade and a half."

Dezeen has commissioned an eclectic list of contributors for the project, with internationally famous figures working alongside emerging and fast-rising creatives.

Each contributor will get a day dedicated to them during the event, during which they will guest edit Dezeen and share the vision behind their manifesto in a live video interview.

The 15 creatives who will participate in Dezeen 15 are, in alphabetical order:

Amber Slooten

Amber Jae Slooten is the co-founder of the digital fashion house The Fabricant, which she established in 2018 with Kerry Murphy to create clothes that only exist in digital spaces.

She studied at Amsterdam Fashion Institute and became the first-ever fashion student to graduate with an entirely digital collection.

Read more about The Fabricant ›

Aric Chen

Aric Chen is an architecture and design curator and a professor at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University.

In 2018, he was named the first curatorial director of the Design Miami events, before becoming the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam as general and artistic director in 2021.

Read more about Aric Chen ›

Beatrice Galilee

Beatrice Galilee is a New York-based critic and curator. She is the founder and executive director of the architecture conference The World Around and author of Radical Architecture of the Future, which was published by Phaidon earlier this year.

Read more about Beatrice Galilee ›

Cave_bureau

Cave_bureau is a Nairobi-based architecture and research practice. It was founded by architects and "spelunkers" Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja in 2014 to lead geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature.

It is currently presenting an installation called Obsidian Rain in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Read Cave_bureau's opinion column about the Venice Architecture Biennale ›

Es Devlin

Es Devlin is a British set designer, artist and director best known for creating large-scale performance environments for the likes of Beyoncé, Kanye West and U2.

She was artistic director of this year's London Design Biennale, for which she filled the courtyard of Somerset House with 400 trees.

Read more about Es Devlin ›

Francesca Sarti

Interdisciplinary designer Sarti is the founder and creative director of the experimental food design studio Arabeschi di Latte. She established the Italian studio in 2001 to blur the boundaries between design, architecture, art and food.

Her work takes the form of exhibition curation and set design through to interior architecture, art direction and styling.

Find out more about Arabeschi di Latte ›

Henna Burney

Henna Burney is a product designer at the design and research laboratory Atelier Luma in Arles, France. Her research involves developing new types of biomaterials and recently developed salt panels for use as cladding inside Frank Gehry's tower for Luma Foundation.

Read more about Atelier Luma ›

Jalila Essaïdi

Jalila Essaïdi is a Dutch artist and inventor based in Eindhoven. She specialises in designing with bio-based materials such as recycled cow dung, which she used to create a fashion collection that explored how to turn waste into valuable products.

She is also the CEO of biotech company Inspidere BV and founder of the BioArt Laboratories arts foundation in Eindhoven that provides entrepreneurs access to a biotech laboratory.

Read more about Jalila Essaïdi ›

Joseph Grima

Writer, curator and architect Joseph Grima is the creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven and co-founder of research studio Space Caviar. He recently authored a manifesto calling for a new type of non-extractive architecture.

Before founding the studio, he curated installations for events including the Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Istanbul Design Biennial.

Read more about Joseph Grima ›

Natsai Audrey Chieza

Natsai Audrey Chieza is founder and CEO at Faber Futures, a design agency that explores the intersection between design and biotechnology. Her work focuses on biofabrication and examines how natural processes such as microbial action can be harnessed to create sustainable products.

Find out more about Natsai Audrey Chieza ›

Neri Oxman

Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli architect and designer. She is the founder and a former professor at The Mediated Matter Group at MIT. She now has her own studio in New York City.

Find out more about Neri Oxman ›

Winy Maas

Dutch architect Winy Maas is co-founder and director of Rotterdam studio MVRDV and head of The Why Factory, a research laboratory and think tank he co-founded with the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology.

Find out more about Winy Maas ›

Yasmeen Lari

Yasmeen Lari was the first Pakistani woman to qualify as an architect. Though she closed her practice in 2000, she continues to advocate "barefoot social architecture" and has built thousands of low-cost homes through the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, a non-profit organisation she cofounded.

Find out more about Yasmeen Lari ›

Space Popular

Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research studio founded by architects Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg. The duo has pioneered the development of virtual architecture, designing the world's first virtual-reality architecture conference.

Find out more about Space Popular ›

Superflux

London design and film studio Superflux was founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009 to explore technology, politics, culture and the environment. Its work is currently on show at both the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Vienna Biennale.

It was one of the first studios to imagine drones being used in cities for surveillance, traffic control and advertising in a project called Drone Aviary, which was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Find out more about Superflux ›

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A carbon revolution is underway. In a major new series starting today, Dezeen explores how this incredible material could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on earth, writes founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs.

Carbon is a miracle material. The only problem is that too much of it is in the wrong place.

But entrepreneurs, scientists, writers, designers and architects are beginning to talk about a carbon revolution that views the element as the saviour of our civilisation, rather than its nemesis.

Carbon deservedly gets a bad press for its role in global warming. Carbon dioxide, a gas formed of carbon and oxygen, is one of several greenhouse gases that are causing climate change, but it is by far the biggest single contributor.

Carbon is also present in methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas which, fortunately, is far less abundant.

Carbon is the building block of all living things.

Yet carbon is also an incredibly useful and important element. Life cannot exist without it: it is the building block of all living things and makes up half the dry mass of every plant and around a fifth of the mass of all animals, including humans.

It is the fourth most abundant element in the universe and easily the most versatile. Carbon atoms can be arranged to form diamonds, graphite, carbon fibre and graphene as well as weird and wonderful nano-materials such as buckminsterfullerene.

It can combine with other elements to create an almost infinite number of compounds such as carbohydrates (including sugars), hydrocarbons (from which most fuels and plastics are made) and carbonates (including limestone). It can be turned into carbon fibre and is an essential ingredient in steel (which is an alloy of iron and carbon).

Carbon is also of course the main constituent of wood and all biomass.

A breathtaking range of new carbon-based materials are being developed around the world.

In addition, a breathtaking range of new carbon-based materials are being developed around the world including food, plastic, fuel and cement – materials whose current production methods are responsible for much of the environmental destruction of our age.

Meanwhile, companies such as Climeworks are developing commercially viable ways of removing large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. This is currently expensive but if the price of atmospheric carbon falls low enough, it could provide an incredible net-zero raw material that could eventually replace fossil fuels while reducing the risk of runaway climate change.

To produce this carbon revolution series, we've spoken to leaders around the world who are working in cutting-edge fields such as carbon capture, carbon utilisation, carbon mineralisation, carbon sequestration and decarbonisation. Our research has opened up a whole new lexicon as well as a breathtaking range of activity and ingenuity.

What if carbon represents an opportunity, rather than a threat?

What unites these figures is their quiet determination to help prevent climate change and their optimism that it can be achieved.

Global warming is such an existential threat that it's easy to succumb to fatalism. Yet ways of addressing it seem so complicated and difficult that it often seems simpler to do nothing.

But what if we're all looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope? What if carbon represents an opportunity, rather than a threat?

In a series of articles we're publishing over the coming days, we hope to swing the telescope around, transforming our readers' understanding of this amazing material and helping them play a part in the carbon revolution.

Carbon revolution

This article is part of Dezeen's carbon revolution series, which explores how this miracle material could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on earth. Read all the content at: www.dezeen.com/carbon.

The sky photograph used in the carbon revolution graphic is by Taylor van Riper via Unsplash.

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High-tech was the last major architecture style of the 20th century. This overview by Owen Hopkins kicks off our series exploring the high-tech movement.

In 1971, a press conference was held at the Élysée Palace to announce the winners of the competition to design a new multidisciplinary arts centre on Paris' vacant Plateau Beaubourg.

On one side stood the immaculately besuited figure of President Georges Pompidou, on the other were the architects: long-haired and dressed rather more casually in tweeds, denim and tie-dye. One of their number even had a beard.

The winning scheme being presented by the architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, then both in their thirties, was even more radical than their appearance. Their design envisioned a vast steel frame, adorned on the outside by lifts, escalators and ventilation ducts, leaving the interior spaces completely open and adaptable.

Piano and Rogers' proposal had beaten 680 other competition entries, but even more remarkably it was actually built, going on to become one of the great buildings of the final decades of the 20th century and embody many of the ideals of high-tech architecture.

The contrasting group of characters standing before the journalists must have been a strange sight. Yet, in a funny way it was entirely fitting, prefiguring how the building would end up symbolising an uneasy alliance between the establishment and 1960s radical culture – an alliance which in a roundabout way has come to define what has become known as high-tech architecture.

Today, the balance of that alliance appears to have shifted decisively in favour of the establishment, as high-tech and its descendants have morphed into a kind of corporate modernism.

One of the great ironies of high-tech was that its signature wide-span open spaces were particularly suited to financial trading floors.

Although high-tech's latter-day corporate manifestations are a world away from the Pompidou, this was always the risk for a movement in which flexibility and adaptability were so integral. And for all of high-tech's vigour and sense of purpose, there remains something about its exaggerated, almost mannered radicalism that suggests somewhere deep down its architects knew that modernism's time was nearly up.

High-tech origins go back to the high point of post-war modernism. And as a child of 1960s radical culture, it has several parents. Firstly, there was Archigram, the avant-garde group of architects based at London's Architectural Association in the 1960s known for their seductive, graphic design and pop culture-inspired imagery.

Fascinated by everything from space travel and sci-fi, to consumerism, mass culture and aspects of Victorian engineering and industrial design, Archigram created captivating visions of futuristic cities.

Among them Peter Cook's Plug-in City, which imagined vast megastructures where individual elements could be added and subtracted as technology and requirements progressed – an idea that carried over directly into high-tech and similarly went unrealised.

Archigram's ideas assumed a future of abundant energy and resources. At the other end of the technological spectrum were Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto who explored what could be achieved through an economy of materials, particularly via tensile structures – which became another familiar feature of high-tech architecture. Then, there was Louis Kahn's idea of "served" and "servant" spaces, which proved highly on high-tech architects' separation of spaces of use from circulation and service spaces.

Finally, there were the ways advanced technology might be aligned to radical social programmes, and in particular the ideas of architect-thinker, Cedric Price. Particularly influential was Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood's 1961 project for a Fun Palace, conceived as a new kind of community cultural space which blurred conventional notions of performance and participation.

Rejecting the monumentality of traditional cultural institutions, Price envisaged the building as a moveable and adaptable framework geared towards the promoting of new social and cultural interactions.

The Centre Pompidou clearly owed a lot to the Fun Palace, and in many ways would have been inconceivable without it. That it got built, and the Fun Palace did not, was due to the architects' willingness to adapt their radical ideas to serve practical, real-world uses, and also the pivotal contributions of the engineer, Peter Rice, a vital and sometimes overlooked figure in the high-tech movement.

Inevitably, the first high-tech projects were modest and small-scale. A good example was the Reliance Controls Factory in Swindon by Team 4 – the short-lived practice formed in 1963 by Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheesman, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.

Completed in 1967, the building comprised a radically stripped-back rectilinear frame, thin diagonal tie-beams and corrugated steel facing – a response to the brief's stipulation for economy and speed of construction.

Arguably even more radical than the overtly industrial structure was the building's lack of separation between managers and shop floor, in favour of a highly flexible, nonhierarchical space – again prefiguring ideas that found later form in Rogers' work at the Pompidou and following buildings.

Team 4 split the same year Reliance Controls was completed: with Rogers and Brumwell setting up a studio, and Foster and Cheesman, who had married in 1964, founding Foster Associates. In 1971, they were appointed to design a new headquarters for the insurance company Willis Faber & Dumas in the East Anglian town of Ipswich.

The resultant building offered a rather different interpretation of high-tech ideas than the inside-out approach.

Instead of abruptly confronting its surroundings as an inside-out building would inevitably have done, the Fosters pushed the technology of the day to its limits to create a gossamer-like glass curtain wall that gently curves its way around the building's perimeter. By day, it reflects the town onto itself and by night, it becomes almost invisible, dramatically lifting the veil on the company's activities within.

Inside, the building features innovative open-plan office spaces, and amenities like a swimming pool and roof-top restaurant and garden, which, together with its exemplary energy performance, showed what high-tech could offer the enlightened corporate client.

The Centre Pompidou had brought high-tech to international attention, but it was the Willis building that signalled the direction the movement would take over the next decade. In 1986, high-tech reached what in retrospect was probably its high point, with the completion of Rogers' Lloyd's building in the City of London, and Foster's Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporations headquarters in Hong Kong.

Both buildings, albeit in quite different and distinct ways, showed in dramatic fashion how externalising a building's structure and services, again made possible by cutting-edge engineering, could allow the creation of uniquely flexible – and thrilling – internal spaces that encouraged interaction among workers, while at the same time make powerful and lasting contributions to cities as different as Hong Kong and London.

High-tech is indelibly associated with the parallel careers of Rogers and Foster, but others associated with the movement created their own variations and took it in different directions.

The work of Nicholas Grimshaw began and has remained more avowedly modernist in its principles, whether in the stripped back Financial Times printworks in east London in 1988, the overtly functionalist Sainsbury's supermarket in Camden, also in 1988, or the neo-futurist geodesic domes of the Eden Project in Cornwall, completed in 2001.

Meanwhile, the partnership of Michael and Patty Hopkins, after creating their own space-age home and the Schlumberger Research Centre in Cambridge in 1985, showed how high-tech could work in historic settings, from Lord's Cricket Ground in 1987 and the Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex in 1994 to Portcullis House, opposite the Houses of Parliament in 2000.

The assimilation of Portcullis House into such an historically sensitive location is a remarkable transformation for a movement that, despite its proponents' admiration for Victorian industrial architecture, has frequently attracted criticism for its often uncompromising aesthetics.

Few buildings attracted the vitriol aimed at the Lloyd's building upon its completion. Yet in retrospect its appearance could not have been more fitting: an office building adopting the aesthetic of industry at the very moment of the UK's shift from industrial to a financial services-based, post-industrial economy – of which a slick, corporatised form of high-tech would become one of the defining aesthetics.

Despite this fate, there is still much that the movement's early ideas can offer our present moment. As technology comes to dominate every facet of our lives and social interactions, the best high-tech buildings offer a clear vision of its emancipatory power, of how deeply held social and democratic values can and should inform its use, so that technology is harnessed for the benefit of everyone.

When in 1966 Cedric Price asked: "Technology is the answer, but what was the question?", Rogers answered him indirectly only a few years later with his belief that the Pompidou must be "a place for all people". Over four decades later, it's an answer that remains as important as ever.

Illustration is by Jack Bedford.

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The Bauhaus, the most influential art and design school in history, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2019. This overview by Owen Hopkins kicks off our Bauhaus 100 series exploring the school's key figures and projects.

There are moments in history when a confluence of ideas, people, and broader cultural and technological forces creates a spark. Sometimes the spark amounts to nothing more than a flicker. But if conditions are right, it can erupt into a dazzling, brilliant light that, while burning for only a brief moment, changes the world around it.

The Bauhaus was one of these – a place that despite the economic turmoil and cultural conservatism of the world around it, offered a truly radical, international and optimistic vision of the future.

Most influential school of design

No school of design has been as influential as the Bauhaus. Although the Bauhaus "style" has been commodified, its most iconic works now available as reproductions and knock-offs, the radical zeal embodied in its ethos and output is still there. Take something as ubiquitous as the tubular chair, now a feature of corporate boardrooms across the world.

The idea for the chair was developed by Marcel Breuer and Mart Stam, who were responsible for the more iconic versions of the design. But in my view, its purest manifestation is actually a version by Mies van der Rohe from 1927: the MR Side Chair.

On one level, the design is an essay in efficiency, devoid of anything extraneous and using the smallest number of different materials – only the chrome-plated steel tubes, the leather seat and back, and the string that ties it together.

Yet, inherent in the design is an amazing drama and flair emerging from that purity, of materials being not just true to themselves but showing off their potential. It is a chair as the purest expression of itself, and embodying the spirit of the modern age.

Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus in 1919

The search for the appropriate cultural response to the conditions of industrial modernity was not, of course, unique to the Bauhaus, or indeed to the period after the first world war.

In 1913, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, argued that: "The new times demand their own expression. Exactly stamped from form devoid of all accident, clear contrasts, the ordering of members, the arrangement of like part in series, unity of form and colour…"

However, this mission was to be delayed and its subsequent direction altered by the horrors of industrial warfare.

Nevertheless, when Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 in the town of Weimar, by bringing together existing institutions – the old Academy of Fine Arts and a more recently established School of Applied Arts – he was still able to proclaim: "Let us conceive, consider and create together the new building of the future that will bring all into one simple integrated creation: architecture, painting and sculpture rising to heaven out of the hand of a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new faith of the future."

From the beginning the Bauhaus – which literally means construction house – sought to unify art and craft, both by bringing these disciplines together (literally) under one roof and in the nature of the curriculum that was taught.

For Gropius, breaking down the old artistic hierarchies was not simply a cultural act, but a social one too, aiming at a fundamental reordering of society for the modern age.

In this, he was not a million miles away from William Morris or even AWN Pugin, who both argued in different ways that traditional design and craft might lead to a return to pre-industrial cultural, social and even religious values. While Gropius similarly saw art and design as an instrument towards a different world, the one he longed for was not some mythic notion of the past but one that came to terms with the conditions of industrial modernity – advocating a cultural movement that we understand today as modernism.

Early Bauhaus did not embrace industry

Initially at least – and somewhat surprisingly in retrospect – this did not mean embracing industry and industrial forms of making. This perhaps explains the mention of the crystal symbol in Bauhaus proclamation, which alluded to the mystical pre-war visions of Bruno Taut's Alpine Architecture.

Among the most influential teachers in the early years of the Bauhaus was Johannes Itten, the expressionist painter, who led a preliminary course for all students exploring colour, formal experimentation and the transcendental possibilities of abstraction, which he saw as connecting to inner mental states.

This position was clearly somewhat at odds with the more materialist view of the Deutsche Werkbund group that had influenced Gropius before the war. Yet even Itten's course could be seen as having a radical social, as well as aesthetic, agenda. Rejecting figuration and existing aesthetic hierarchies opened up the possibility of a universal, class-less culture.

After this preliminary course, which was at various times taught by such luminaries as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Josef Albers, students would graduate to more specialised studies, such as weaving, metalwork, pottery and cabinet making. Again, there was a clear contradiction between Gropius' aim of unifying art and craft, and maintaining these disciplinary distinctions, but their continuation reflected financial realities that the Bauhaus had to face.

However from 1922 the direction of the Bauhaus, then still in Weimar, began to change. The Germany economy was beginning to recover, while the visit of the De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg appeared to have initiated a shift towards a new overtly modernist design language and a renewed interest in integrating design and industry.

László Moholy-Nagy took over Itten's preliminary course and introduced a more machine-orientated aesthetic and philosophy. As if to confirm the change of direction, Gropius declared in an article around the exhibition of 1923: "The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it."

Bauhaus building in Dessau embodies school's values

In retrospect, the following years were the heyday of the Bauhaus. In 1925, the school moved from Weimar to a new building designed by Gropius himself on a site outside the town of Dessau.

Gropius' design was a synthesis of everything the Bauhaus stood for – bringing together arts, crafts and industry into a total work of art. As one of the first buildings of the so-called International Style, the building has become so familiar and imitated that it is sometimes forgotten how radical it really was – the built manifestation of the new abstract language of modernism.

Composed of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines and planes, the building's pin-wheel plan, with wings splaying out over the site, rejected – or rather transcended – traditional symmetry. As a result, there was no clear hierarchy between various components of the building (as befitting the lack of hierarchy in the various activities that went on inside).

Modern materials – steel, glass and concrete – were deployed to reveal their structural and symbolic potential, for example, in the long plate-glass ribbon windows, cantilevered balconies and the bridge that elevated one of the wings over a road that ran across the site.

The design emerged as both a function of the building's intended use – a building for the machine age – and as a complex allusion to the deeper, universal meanings and implications of abstraction. In short, it was the essence of the Bauhaus captured in three-dimensions.

The Bauhaus' internationalism led to suspicion 

Over the following years, a student at the Bauhaus might encounter Marcel Breuer leading the cabinet-making department and developing those radical and iconic furniture designs, Gunta Stölzl revolutionising the art of textile design and production through abstraction and unorthodox materials, metalworking with teachers such as Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt producing designs that would readily translate to mass-production, and Kandinsky and Klee exploring new ways to consider form.

For a brief moment, the Bauhaus held the keys that might unlock the future. Perhaps inevitably things were not to last.

The Bauhaus had attracted criticism from the beginning. It was viewed with suspicion for the very reasons that made it so important: its internationalism, which was perceived as foreignness; its social progressiveness, both within the school and in the view of the world it espoused, which was equated with Bolshevism; and its new aesthetic, which was seen as degenerate in contrast to supposedly natural German cultural tradition.

Attacks on the school intensified under Meyer

In 1928, Gropius left the school, with Hannes Meyer succeeding him as director. Meyer's overtly functionalist and ideological direction saw the attacks on the Bauhaus intensify in a climate already deeply suspicious of anything not deemed authentically German.

Mies van der Rohe oversaw the final years until the school's closure in 1933, with many of its leading lights emigrating to the USA where they continued to expound Bauhaus ideals through their teaching methods and philosophies.

Although the Bauhaus lasted little more than a decade, a simple measure of its significance is that no school of architecture or design can legitimately claim not to have been influenced by it in some way. But the Bauhaus' impact extended far beyond design education – it was a place conceived from the beginning to grapple with a fast changing world, and to find a cultural response that would not just mitigate its transformations, but to mould them for the benefit of all.

It is with some irony that as we celebrate the centenary of the Bauhaus, the forces of nationalism, conservatism and cultural retrenchment that led to its closure, and in the years following, to death and destruction on a scale unprecedented in human history, are returning with a vengeance.

In this increasingly reactionary and populist world, the ideals of the Bauhaus – its internationalism, its willingness to grapple with, rather shy away from, a changing world, and its fundamental optimism about the future – are needed more than ever.

Main illustration is by Jack Bedford.

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To mark 150 years since the birth of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, we're looking back at five influential projects that defined his career. First up is Hill House in Helensburgh, widely recognised as the Scottish architect's most important residential work.

Completed in 1904 Hill House exemplifies Mackintosh's approach to combining traditional Scottish values with modern international ideas.

Located in Helensburgh, around 40 kilometres northwest of Glasgow, the project was commissioned by publisher Walter Blackie.

Mackintosh believed that to design a home properly he had to understand the needs of its occupants, so he spent a great deal of time with the Blackie family during the project's initial stage to ensure his proposal suited their lifestyle.

Walter Blackie himself said: "Not until we had decided on these inside arrangements did he submit drawings of the elevations."

The building displays typical Mackintosh influences, with a robust exterior referencing Scottish vernacular architecture, contrasting with a highly ornamental interior, featuring oriental themes alongside art-nouveau and art-deco details.

Mackintosh collaborated with his wife, the artist Margaret MacDonald, to create almost every element of the house, from the architecture to the furniture, fireplaces, lighting and textiles.

Blackie could not afford to complete the interior entirely according to Mackintosh's designs, so the architect focused on the principal spaces of the hallway, library, master bedroom and drawing room.

The hall and library are typically masculine spaces, defined by the use of strong, geometric lines and dark wood. The timber panelling is embellished with pieces of coloured glass and stencilled organic motifs.

In contrast, the drawing room and master bedroom are examples of the white rooms that Mackintosh became renowned for. These stark, bright and spacious rooms made the most of the available natural light and were extremely novel at the time.

The feminine and delicate design of the bedroom features walls painted ivory white, which were hung with embroidered panels of dreaming women.

Several iconic decorative motifs now synonymous with Mackintosh are found throughout the interior, including chequered forms often resulting from intersecting vertical and horizontal wooden elements.

The gridded motif recurs in furniture including a cube-shaped table designed for the drawing room, and the iconic ladderback chairs that create a bold contrast against the pale walls of the bedroom.

Mackintosh contrasted the geometric shapes with organic decorations, including a stylised rose that was stencilled onto walls and fabrics.

The rose motif was echoed in embroidered upholstery and a gesso panel that Margaret created to hang above the fireplace in the drawing room.

Mackintosh was still a partner at the firm of Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh, and was in the process of overseeing the first phase of construction on the Glasgow School of Art, when he first started to receive commissions for private houses.

His first completed residential project was Windyhill, a house designed for businessman and art collector William Davidson, in the village of Kilmacolm.

Hill House was the second but has become the better known. It is judged by critics as being the finest expression of his residential architecture.

Despite the critical acclaim both received, they were the only private homes Mackintosh designed from scratch in his entire career. Many prospective clients were put off by his radical approach and by his reputation for demanding complete control of his projects.

Hill House has been in the care of the National Trust for Scotland since the 1980s. Last year the organisation, revealed plans to undertake a restoration prompted by the discovery that the building's Portland cement render has been compromised by decades of exposure to westerly winds and rain.

London architecture studio Carmody Groarke has designed an enormous see-through enclosure to protect the building during the renovations. An urgent fundraising appeal was launched in February 2018 to try to secure the funds required to construct it.

Photography courtesy of Glasgow Mackintosh group, apart from where otherwise stated.

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World Heritage Corb: we're revisiting some of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier's most important projects, to mark the addition of 17 of his buildings to UNESCO's World Heritage list. First up is his seaside holiday cabin, Cabanon, on the Côte d'Azur in France – a tiny building tied to some of the most important moments in the architect's life.

Le Corbusier, who is one of the 20th century's most admired architects and a key member of the Modernist movement, designed the cabin as a seaside escape away from Parisian city life.

For 18 years Le Corbusier spent every August at the cabin, built in 1951 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin – a small enclave between Monaco and Manton on the south coast.

Although the Cabanon resembles a traditional Canadian log cabin from the outside, it was carefully designed along modular principles developed by Le Corbusier.

Made from prefabricated parts, the design is based on the Modulor – an anthropometric scale of proportion developed by the architect in response to the movement of the human body.

The cabin contains a single 3.6 by 3.6-metre wood-lined room, with no kitchen or indoor washing facilities.

Instead, it was attached via an internal partition to the cafe next door, L'Etoile de Mer, which was owned by the Rebuto family. To pay for the land he built his cabin on, Le Corbusier also built five holiday homes for the family called Unités de Camping.

Resembling a row of gypsy caravans in bright primary colours, these houses were more in keeping with Le Corbusier's Brutalist style, offering a greater contrast to the rustic log cabin next to them.

The cabin is the smallest of Le Corbusier's projects to be added to UNESCO's World Heritage List of internationally significant architecture. It is also the most tied to the architect's personal life.

It sits just to the east of the E-1027 house by Irish designer Eileen Gray, a crisp white Modernist building that Le Corbusier visited regularly as a guest of Gray's ex-lover Jean Badovici. Le Corbusier painted big, colourful murals on the white walls of the house, infuriating Gray.

This act has been widely described as vandalism, and an example of misogyny in architecture. However, some commentators believe the reverence that Le Corbusier is held in has also helped with the preservation of Gray's design. It remains one of the most controversial moments in European Modernism.

Le Corbusier also supposedly designed the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp – one of his most famous buildings – while staying at the Cabanon, and died swimming off the coast nearby in 1965 at the age of 77.

The Cabanon, Unités de Camping, and E-1027 were later collectively declared a "Site Moderne" – a designated area of cultural importance.

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Pomo summer: this summer, we celebrate the revival of the architecture and design movement everybody loves to hate. To kick off the series, Dezeen editor Anna Winston explains why Postmodernism is back.

Love it or hate it, Postmodernism is back in vogue. Welcome to the first in a summer-long series in which Dezeen explores the movement, its legacy and its return.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be interviewing some of Postmodernism's leading architects and designers, profiling key buildings and products, as well as highlighting a new wave of Postmodern design.

This week, we'll publish the Dezeen guide to Postmodernism, written by Glenn Adamson, director of New York's Museum of Arts and Design (MAD).

Later in the season, we'll round up some of the best examples of work from the Postmodern revival, while regular Dezeen columnist Sam Jacob – a co-founder of the now defunct Radical Postmodernist architecture studio FAT – to examine the movement's ongoing relevance.

In his debut column for Dezeen, US critic and educator Aaron Betsky will examine how the experimental approach of the Postmodernists has shaped architectural education, influencing new generations of students.

And Charles Holland – a co-founder of FAT and now director of London studio Ordinary Architecture – will also share his top 10 lost Postmodern classics.

Postmodernism began in the late 1970s as an ideological reaction against the utopian ideals of Modernism. While the latter was concerned with purity of design, less being more and proscriptive ideas about taste and order, Postmodernism was about ornamentation, contradiction and experimentation.

Aesthetically this manifested itself in bright colours, bold forms constructed from simplistic shapes like a child's building set, and decorative flourishes that had nothing to do with function.

It reached fever pitch in design in the 1980s, and continued in architecture right through to the late 1990s.

Despite its pervasive reach, Postmodernism was the design movement hardly anyone wanted to be part of. Glenn Adamson, one of the co-curators of the V&A's major Postmodernism exhibition in London in 2011, found it almost impossible to track down architects who would admit to being Postmodernist.

"It got to the point that we would tease them: 'are you now or have you ever been a Postmodernist?'" he says.

Critic Stephen Bayley described the V&A's Postmodernism exhibition as "a chamber of horrors", but it proved a remarkably prescient retrospective. Since the exhibition finished, young designers from Milan to New York have been slowly but surely reviving the Postmodern aesthetic.

It started with a wave of renewed interest in the work of the Memphis Group – a hugely influential cadre of designers led by Ettore Sottsass that began as a marketing exercise and went on to help define the style of an entire decade in the 1980s.

Dezeen wrote about the revival last year, after Milan design week was flooded with Memphis-inspired pieces.

Small firms like Eindhoven studio OS & OOS have been among the aesthetic torch-bearers for the Postmodern revival, although bigger brands like Hay have also climbed on board.

In London, design store Darkroom has featured increasingly Postmodern-influenced collections by a range of small studios. And in Milan this year, furniture brand Kartell released a collection of nine original pieces by Ettore Sottsass, which it has put into production for the first time, while Konstantin Grcic debuted his cartoonish Sam Son chair, which has a back support shaped like a pool noodle.

Architecture, as always, is a bit slower on the uptake – it takes five years to complete a building and five months (if that) to realise a furniture concept. But MVRDV's headline-making Markthal in Rotterdam – with its chunky tunnel-like arch and oversized bright fruit murals, could easily be viewed through a Postmodernist lens.

The latest version of Postmodernism is a bit more toned down than the original – softer around the edges, less obviously like children's building blocks, but perhaps more infantile in its superficiality and brazen commercialism.

Earlier this year, one of the Postmodernism's early champions, Alessandro Mendini, told Dezeen that there is no more ideology in design. Certainly, the Postmodern revival is more interested in looks than in grand ideas. But whether he was right or wrong, the echoes of Postmodernism are clearly visible.

It helped break down the boundaries between styles and disciplines, encouraging and allowing designers to be experimental in making new shapes and bringing in references from the past as well as exploring the possibilities of technology.

In architecture, designers like Robert AM Stern and Michael Graves looked to the past, championing a return to decoration and incorporating columns and pediments into their facades. In furniture and product design, the focus was often on developing new shapes and challenging ideas about how everyday objects should look and function.

While the furniture is starting to attract high prices at auction, many of the best historic examples of Postmodern architecture are now under threat. Graves' Portland Building was saved from demolition last year, following one of the first preservation campaigns for a Postmodern building. Dezeen columnist Alexandra Lange, although not among the fans of the building, was among those convinced it was worth saving.

But if Postmodernism was ultimately about freedom to experiment, about humour and levity after years of serious-minded Modernism, you could argue that it never really went away. It's just been lingering in the background, waiting until we became so utterly bored of tastefulness that it could find a way to elbow itself back into our collective consciousness, in a more image-led and superficial way than its originators could ever have dreamt up.

After years of tasteful Modernist revivals, of mid-century everything, of blonde-wood furniture and muted upholstery palettes, of po-faced brickwork used to disguise developer-friendly housing, of artfully styled succulents against a backdrop of Scandinavian repro-classics, it's time for something a bit more fun.

Illustration is by Daniel Frost.

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Brutalism: one of the 20th century's most controversial architecture movements is back in vogue with design fans as nostalgia mixes with a new-found respect for its socialist principals. In our new series, Dezeen will be revisiting some of the key projects from the Brutalist period, but first here's a short introduction from the Royal Academy's Owen Hopkins.

Bold, brash and confrontational, there can hardly be a more controversial – or misunderstood – architectural movement than Brutalism. Its very name is misleading, causing many to condemn its concrete creations for their apparent "brutality". Brutalism's etymology actually lies in the French béton-brut – literally "raw concrete" – the movement's signature material. But Brutalism was concerned with far more than materials, emerging in the early 1950s through dissatisfaction with existing forms of Modernism, from which it aimed to make a conscious departure while at the same time recapturing its original heroic spirit.

Today, we use the term Brutalism to refer to both a particular moment in post-war British architecture – given the epithet New Brutalism by the critic Reyner Banham – and the broader phenomenon during the 1960s and 1970s of an almost sculptural Modernism rendered in raw concrete, which had manifestations the world over.

For a movement that is synonymous with concrete, it is some surprise that the building that is often seen as inaugurating the New Brutalism was mainly made of steel, glass and brick. This was Alison and Peter Smithson's Hunstanton School in Norfolk (1947–54), where the architects transposed the vocabulary of Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of Technology into an asymmetrical plan with materials left in their raw, unfinished states. This use of materials "as found" was in deliberate contrast to the elegant curving roof, neat tiling and timber detailing of Leslie Martin and Robert Matthew's Scandinavian-influenced Royal Festival Hall – the type of Modernism the Smithsons had in their sights. For Banham, who became something of a cheerleader for the New Brutalism, Hunstanton was "almost unique among modern buildings in being made of what it appears to be made of". So stark was the result, he was moved to suggest that the New Brutalism constituted an ethical, as much as an aesthetic, proposition.

In some ways the Miesian derivations at Hunstanton were something of a false start for the emerging Brutalism. The movement's most important single influence was undoubtedly Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, both in terms of aesthetics and social programme. Completed in 1952, the Unité comprised 12 storeys of generously proportioned apartments accessed from interior "streets", raised up on pilotis and topped by a roof terrace – all built from roughly cast béton-brut. Although the Unité still reflected the utopian aspirations of pre-war Modernism then under attack, Brutalists like the Smithsons saw its form and aesthetic as reflective of the spirit of the present moment and providing a way forward for a broader regeneration of Modern architecture.

Many ideas from the Unité appeared in the Smithsons' unbuilt 1952 design for the Golden Lane Estate in London. The interior "streets" of the Unité became exterior "street-decks" at every third level – forerunners to the infamous "streets-in-the-sky" that would become ubiquitous in social housing projects in the 1960s and 1970s. These made the building's circulation legible, while aiming to facilitate the type of social interactions one might have on an actual street. The blocks were arranged to work with the surrounding street layout, rather than standing in isolation as per the Corbusian model. Though of different building types, the Smithsons' Golden Lane Estate design developed many of the ideas they had explored at Hunstanton, "emphasising visible circulation, [and] identifiable units of habitation," according to Banham.

Rather than presenting their designs through plans, sections and elevations in the conventional way, the Smithsons created collages, with cut-outs of people pasted onto their drawings, so, in Banham's words, "the human presence almost overwhelmed the architecture". While, a generation before, Le Corbusier had famously taken inspiration from ocean liners and motors cars, the Smithsons looked towards everyday life – advertisements, bric-a-brac, what they called "the stuff of the urban scene". These concerns were shared by a number of artists, especially those associated with the Independent Group centred on London's ICA, with the parallels coming to public attention in a seminal exhibition, This is Tomorrow, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956.

As the austerity of the 1950s gave way to the energy and renewed national self-confidence of the 1960s, Brutalism took centre stage, defining British architecture of that decade. Brutalist social housing began appearing all over Britain, with notable examples, such as Park Hill in Sheffield (1957–61) by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith and Southampton's Wyndham Court (completed 1966) by Lyons Israel Ellis, ensuring raw concrete and "streets-in-the-sky" became familiar sights.

Brutalism was by no means confined to social housing. The Smithsons' Economist Building in London's St James's (1962–64) showed how Brutalist ideas could be deployed in sensitive settings. Its cluster of three towers of different heights with an elegant plaza at ground level allowed the creation of a deliberately complex relationship to its historic site. Outside London, the Preston Bus Station (1968–69) by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of Building Design Partnership saw Brutalism used to give municipal civic identity to major pieces of infrastructure. This was an idea also explored by Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon, whose Trinity Square car park in Gateshead (1962–67), made famous by the 1971 film Get Carter, and Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth (1962–67) were both local landmarks – for better or for worse – before their respective demolitions in 2010 and 2004.

Although the theoretical roots of the New Brutalism were decidedly British, even English, rough sculptural buildings of raw concrete rose all over the world during the 1960s and 1970s. From Paul Rudolph's Yale Art and Architecture Building (completed in 1963), to Paulo Mendes de Rocha's Brazilian Museum of Sculpture in São Paulo (completed 1988) and Kenzo Tange's Kuwait Embassy in Tokyo (completed 1970), raw concrete became a global language. Though emerging from different contexts and theoretical viewpoints, these various manifestations of Brutalism shared an ambition to reinvent modernism, to create an architecture that was hard-edged – literally and conceptually – that was radical and often confrontational.

In the late 1960s, the Smithsons finally got their chance to put their social housing ideas into practice with Robin Hood Gardens in London's Poplar, close to Ernő Goldfinger's Brutalist residential building Balfron Tower (1965–67). Their scheme comprised two, relatively low-rise blocks arranged around a garden area, which was landscaped with raised mounds, so that greenery was visible from the windows of even higher floors. The two blocks contained both flats and maisonettes, the idea being to encourage a greater social mix than possible with just one type of dwelling. With cars banished, residences were accessed via 'streets-in-the-sky', intended as ever to facilitate the interactions and social ties between neighbours through which a community might emerge.

Robin Hood Gardens in many ways constituted the ultimate realisation of the progressive social ideals that informed much of Brutalist thinking, but by the time it was completed in 1972, the Brutalist moment had passed and it was an almost immediate failure. The rough idealism of the 1950s no longer reflected the consumerist realities of the 1970s. The poverty the estate was meant to alleviate was instead compounded by a high crime rate and frequent vandalism of communal areas, which were rarely properly maintained. Rather than presenting an idealistic view of the future, Robin Hood Gardens came to represent all that was wrong with the intertwining of architecture and housing policy, and the top-down way those policies were usually implemented.

Some hailed it as a masterpiece. However, for many others Robin Hood Gardens was just another "concrete monstrosity" that "brutalised" its inhabitants, and no different from the usually cheap and uninspiring slab blocks erected all over Britain during the post-war years. Despite this frequent lumping together of post-war Modernism, Brutalist buildings always seem to attract particularly harsh criticism. The architecture which so epitomised the golden era of the 1960s became widely reviled and frequent victim to the wrecking ball. For those on the left of the political spectrum, the destruction of Britain's Brutalist legacy is nothing more than an attempt to erase that brief moment of socialist housing policy from collective memory. But this largely belies the fact many that many housing estates erected in utopian fervour failed on their own terms, revealing the inherent shortcomings of intertwining architecture and social policy – and, often, of the buildings themselves.

Nevertheless, in recent years Brutalism has undergone something of a rehabilitation, becoming fashionable in certain architectural circles. It is a remarkable reversal (albeit with a long way to go), especially when one realises the most pernicious aspect of Brutalism's legacy – the wedge its bloody-minded and often rather arrogant polemics drove between architects and the public – is still affecting architecture today. At their best, though, Brutalist buildings have a sublime and haunting power like few others – and should be preserved for posterity. Walking south along Waterloo Bridge at dusk with the powerful concrete masses of the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall rearing up in front of you and The Kinks' song Waterloo Sunset, released in 1967, the same year those buildings were completed, ringing in one's ears, it is hard not to be struck by the poignancy of the lyric: "As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise".

Owen Hopkins is manager of the Architecture Programme at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the author of Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon (2012) and Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide (2014).

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