Ironically, the Grenfell fire occurred amid a wave of Brutalist nostalgia among British “creatives”-a parallel universe of artists, architects, graphic designers, art historians, and critics, along with the developers, PR types, and upwardly mobile professionals keeping their company-and on the heels of numerous book-length paeans to Brutalist buildings in Britain and elsewhere. Many of the 4,500 government-subsidized tower blocks erected by 1979 have been demolished. These buildings’ ill-conceived designs and often shoddy construction facilitated everything from vermin and black mold infestations to rampant criminality. Tower blocks and high-rise slabs-the slabs often inspired by Le Corbusier’s quintessentially Brutalist Unité d’habitation (1952) in Marseilles, an exotic rectangular structure raised on bulky stilts, or pilotis-proved particularly inhospitable to their lower-income inhabitants. Now awaiting demolition, Grenfell’s scorched cadaver is a grim reminder that legions of Britain’s modernist housing projects turned out to be newfangled slums that hardly improved on the old row-house slums demonized by planners and architects. The tower recently had been given a shiny new exterior cladding that converted it into a high-rise firetrap. Topped off in 1974, toward the end of a massive postwar housing-construction campaign, the original tower was a Brutalist concrete hulk with the familiar sterile, diagrammatic array of horizontal window strips. The 24-story Grenfell Tower in London, where a voracious fire that started in a fourth-floor refrigerator took 71 lives in June 2017, was what the British call a tower block, anchoring a housing project with three low-rise “finger blocks” extending from it in a grassy, fenced-in compound.
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