Keeling House

The approach to Keeling House is down a series of tight, small roads.  The effect, then, when you turn a corner and come to it, is pretty startling.  It's just there, looming at you, rather like an alien spacecraft that's crashed to Earth and buried itself, nose-first, in the ground, its four wings seemingly more appropriate to interstellar travel than public housing.

Keeling House was designed in 1956 by Denys Lasdun.  He also designed the National Theatre, memorably described by Prince Charles as a "a nuclear power station in the middle of London" and part of the South Bank arts complex whose grim clutter of Brutalist buildings was used by Stanley Kubrick as the setting for one of the most unpleasant murder sequences in A Clockwork Orange.  Lasdun also designed the University of East Anglia, another Brutalist concrete space that doubled as the fictional Lowlands campus, "a swamp of fear and loathing", in Andrew Davies' bleak TV satire, A Very Peculiar Practice.

Brutalism came out of the modernist architectural movement; the term comes from the French, beton brut, or "raw concrete".  The modernist housing theory was to create functional, zoned urban living, to impose order on the organic sprawl of cities.  You can argue that part of the charm of cities is the cheek-by-jowl jostling of buildings of different size, shape and design.  I love walking through the City, for instance, and randomly coming across a tiny little c.15th church tucked away down a cobbled alleyway next to the gleaming glass and concrete offices of some international bank, or the way Leadenhall Market pokes cheekily through the franchised rows of Monsoon, Boots and Tesco.

The key problem with modernist housing theory, though, is it leads to sterile, isolated living spaces, the most pessimistic outcome of that being community breakdown.  Winston Churchill wrote "We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us," and it's a theme that's been employed frequently by the brilliant novelist JG Ballard, most pertinently in High Rise, where gangs of residents in a 40-storey tower block lead murderous skirmishes to "enemy" floors.

Lasdun, though, seems to be something of a humanist in all this, and if Keeling House is partly a reaction against the more stringent theories of modernist housing, it also attempts to embrace its more positive aspects.  Here, Lasdun set out to create a vertical equivalent to a typical East End community; each of the four wings, for instance, faces inward, and he designed communal "drying areas" where residents could meet and chat, the purpose of all this to encourage the kind of social interactivity he worried might otherwise be lost.

Certainly, compared to virtually any other example you'd care to mention of high rise housing built in the 1950s and Sixties, Keeling House is a masterpiece of far-sighted vision and an undoubted architectural highlight.  In 1993, the National Trust made it a Grade II listed building; the first council block ever awarded such a status, and the subject of much horror among blue rinse traditionalists.  It was bought by a private developer in 1999, who converted into private flats.  One of them, in fact, recently bought by my friends Neal and Laura.

Walking in through the security gates you come to a slatted bridge [pic 3] that runs over an external water feature [pic 4], only the absence of brightly coloured and exotic fish in the water dispelling a state of Zen-like calm.  Once through the main door, there's an imposing stone concierge's desk in the middle of a glass atrium, through which you can look up at the residential wings, everything very open, very transparent, a statement that this is not like any other council block around, no dark corners, nothing concealed here.  There's something of a sci-fi quality to it; it looks like the kind of place they might have used as the location for an episode of Blake's 7, the concierge desk manned by a masked Federation trooper, that kind of thing.

The apartments themselves run to 48 two bedroom maisonettes, eight penthouses (added by redevelopers Lincoln Holdings), eight one bedroom single-level flats and two garden level maisonettes.  Neal and Laura own one of the two bedroom maisonettes, the living room facing outwards, the view quite spectacularly stretching over to Canary Wharf and beyond.  The redevelopment has seen the addition of wooden floorings, stainless steel window frames and revamped kitchen units.

The whole things is pretty impressive, I have to say.  What interests me is how this building, originally designed to house council tenants, has been refurbished and sold on to what one estate agent describes as "the loft-buying market"; how apparently when it reopened in June 2000 300 people, mostly City folk, turned up for viewings, Keeling House now the subject of TV documentaries and broadsheet articles, the epitome of urban cool in the heart of Bethnal Green.

It seems to me that, perhaps inevitably, Lasdun's admirably humanistic design principles have been commodified.  Sure, it's improved the original building, but that's not the issue.  I just wonder where that leaves social housing.