Smash hit

In London, the “streets in the sky” they proposed in 1951 for Golden Lane, a bomb site on the edge of the City, copied the tight-knit form of existing terraces, made of individual “House of the Future” pods, but stacked six storeys high in higgledy-piggledy megastructures, with drive-in garages underneath, snaking across and “sewing” together the bombed city from within.

The only proper realisation of this idea was Robin Hood Gardens, completed in 1972. But it fails because it was penny-pinchingly funded, resulting in mean balconies, poor detailing and not a whiff of the House of the Future’s glamour.

It also fails because the Smithsons never found a satisfying architectural form that could be mass-produced for the “anonymous client” of the welfare state without being as dully utilitarian as the classic Modernist predecessors they attacked. Even their 1964 Economist Building (well funded, better detailed, where stone replaces concrete) in St James’s, Westminster, is a dull affair.

Those they influenced, though, were more successful: Denys Lasdun’s cluster blocks in Bethnal Green, Jack Lynn and Gordon Ryder’s Park Hill estate, Sheffield, or Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican are the best part-realisation of the Smithsons’ theories and give the lie to the fallacy that Modernist estate architecture equals misery and deprivation. Not, it seems, when somebody — rich residents, admittedly — actually pays for them to be managed and looked after.

The Design Museum’s exhibition, though, does reveal how successful the Smithsons were at the other end of their grand vision. Their urban streets in the sky were just one part of a whole network of housing types to renew the nation, modern versions of traditional British standards, right down to rural housing and the one-off private house.

Upper Lawn, a beautiful glass and wood weekend home, nestles neatly into the Wiltshire landscape. Sugden House is a deft reimagining of the boxy suburban house as an open-plan home in brick, timber and tiles. Burrows Lea Farm is a sadly unbuilt fusion of the Modernist villa and “the 1950s equivalent of the English half-timbered house”.

The show makes much of a series of jobs that the Smithsons did in the 1980s and 1990s on Hexenhaus, the German home of Axel Bruchhauser, the owner of the furniture company Tecta. I don’t care much for their “encrustations” and spatial tricks, but at least they show that faced with a real flesh-and-blood client, not an anonymous one, the Smithsons could almost live up to the radicalism of their astonishing theories.

Peter Smithson, who died earlier this year, a decade after his wife, wrote that “the realised buildings are objectives we have taken; they are not the intention of the war”.

It’s almost as if he realised that his built forms failed to live up to his radical future vision. People expected them to change the world in a generation or two. It took a little longer but they were right in the end.

Today’s young architects, such as David Adjaye and Foreign Office Architects, admit to addressing the same essential puzzle set by the Smithsons 50 years ago, “the problem of identity in a mobile society”, how to create relevant architecture that means something in a constantly shifting, globalising world.

And how prescient the 1956 House of the Future seems today. Sure, we can chuckle at the ludicrous Austin Powers fashions of its model residents: chunky-knit leggings with sewn-in shoes didn’t quite catch on (give the Milan catwalks a couple more years). But an open-plan pod of sensuous curves, prefabricated like a car, packed with consumer goods, all mod cons built in, lounged in by a leisured, childless couple in sportswear?

It sounds exactly like the housing solution being proposed by the great and the good for Britain’s current housing crisis.

In a sense, though, we already live today in the world that the Smithsons predicted, awash with consumer choice, in a city ruled by the car. We even like high-rises. What is Canary Wharf other than one giant megastructure? What are the giant cliffs of Docklands apartments next to Robin Hood Gardens but streets in the sky: like it, gated fortresses accessed by the car, only faced in twee bricks not concrete, and £300,000 a pop.

• The Smithsons: The House of the Future to a House for Today runs from Dec 6 to Feb 29 at the Design Museum, London, SE1 (0870-833 9955)