Robin Hood Gardens (1972), the London housing estate that realized the urban principles of Peter and Alison Smithson, is now in the process of being literally and figuratively deconstructed. As would suit a pair of architects whose professional careers began with musings over the “as found” rubble of postwar London, the Victoria and Albert Museum has stepped in to salvage a three-story section of the structure from the demolition site. The segment, despite the curatorial conservation of its fittings and cabinetry, is no arbitrarily, or even programmatically, determined fragment: it represents a full iteration of the repeated graphic sequence that once formed the building's façade. This pattern of prefabricated parts preserves the centrality of the representational method that was as fundamental to the Smithsons' practice as were off-the-shelf materials.

The graphology of this reliquary also encapsulates the spirit of the disproportionate quantity of historical research into the Smithsons and their work that has been conducted over the past few decades. Much has been made of the Smithsons' commentary on the compilation of advertisements, as well as their affection for raw industrial materiality. Scholars, myself included, have deployed interactions of the couple with the politics of the discipline at home and abroad to preserve a portrait of an era that is both peculiarly British and central to the devolution of mainstream modernism. The universality of the particular was a strong theoretical suit of the Smithsons …