Speculate Regenerate

Project Details...

THE FERRIER ------------------ The Ferrier Estate was built in 1972 and is located in Kidbrooke, South East London. The estate is an example of neo-brutalist architecture, which was common for large scale social housing schemes in the UK during the 1960's and 70's. The estate was very popular with residents when it first opened, but like many similar housing estates, it became associated with high rates of crime and anti-social behaviour. Like the Heygate estate in the Elephant and Castle, the building design of the Ferrier was often put forward as the primary reason for the decline of the estate. This of course, oversimplifies a range of issues, which led to it's bad reputation. The Ferrier is now undergoing a one billion pound regeneration and large parts of the estate have already been demolished. Most of the estate residents were 'decanted' by the end of 2011, but there were still some remaining in early 2012. "It is easy to see the absurdity of a belief in the healing power of masonry – it is a superstition, animism – but people fall for it again and again and they are not entirely wrong to do so. For, if it is a mistake to think that a house can mend a family, the opposite is also false. That is, the built background to our lives is not irrelevant, either. To put the case negatively, the wrong kinds of buildings can inflict misery and frustration. To be more positive, we want buildings to embellish, beautify, dignify, distract or divert. We want them to propose and to enable: to suggest what could be, to make things possible, to give freedoms. The idea of home, whether expressed as stable cosmos or as nomadic wandering, shows a basic truth, which is that the space we occupy is not neutral to us. We cannot look at it with detachment. We are in it, we make it and it makes us." Quote from "The Inescapable Power of Architecture", By Rowan Moore in The Observer, August 12th 2012.