Salute the building brutes

Robin Hood Gardens in east London looks like the archetype of a grim modernist estate. Set above the roaring mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel, and pallisaded with concrete fins, this stain-streaked fortress seems made for rain. It is like a face scoured by the raw winter wind. It is hard to imagine the sun shining here, ever. Its walkways, which its architects wanted to be "streets in the air" and full of sociable bustle, are bare and empty.

It is notorious for the violence it attracted even before it was completed, in 1972, and was once used to represent communist Moscow in a Levi's ad. Now, at a time when some buildings of its generation are finally being appreciated, Robin Hood Gardens has defied rehabilitation.

English Heritage considered listing it - as it has listed Erno Goldfinger's Balfron Tower, a 28-storey concrete neighbour of Robin Hood Gardens - but chose not to. "The planning of the flats is unsatisfactory and unresolved" is the main reason given. "They are dark, with an inefficient use of space."

"It is a matter of some debate," says the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which looks after the estate, "as to whether this particular style of design is suitable for social housing." Robin Hood Gardens, in short, would seem to be an all too brutal example of the style of architecture that proudly called itself the New Brutalism.

So why is the Design Museum, that temple of all things delightful in contemporary artefacts, dedicating an exhibition, opening 6 December, to Alison and Peter Smithson, architects of Robin Hood Gardens and the leading exponents of New Brutalism? And why should the Smithsons be venerated (as they are) by many in the younger generation of architects? Alison Smithson died in 1993, and Peter earlier this year, but their ideas will live on into the future.

Actually, there is a reason, which is that the Smithsons represented values that have been under attack for a quarter-century, and which look ever more attractive as they become more remote. They believed in thoughtfulness, and nobility, and allowing space and time to contemplate and consider your place in the world. They were conscientious and wanted to create buildings not only for the moment, but also for an unknown future. They were extremely serious people, staring gravely at the camera in almost every known picture of them.

"Tomorrow will inherit only space," they said early in their career. "Our ultimate responsibility is therefore the creation of noble space." Yet they were not talking about designing grandiose monuments. They also wanted to design "for the particular", which meant making places that were right for their location and settings for everyday life.

Nowadays, by contrast, space is a thing to be sold and filled, to be appropriated by logos and shopping. Time is to be grasped and wrung dry. The particular is seen as an impediment to the power of mass markets, unless it can be described as a "niche" and sold for a high price.

The Smithsons designed buildings that are not gaudy or ostentatious but have strong personalities. They wrote of "architecture's capacity to charge the space around it with energy" and "influence the nature of things that might come" and achieved this through careful thought about things that are not immediately obvious, such as the width of paving, the rhythm of pillars, or changes of scale or level.

You can see this in another of their London projects, the Economist complex in St James's Street, where a group of new and old buildings loosely encloses an irregular raised plaza, a "pre-entry space" as the Smithsons described it, "in which there is time to re-arrange sensibilities preparatory to entering the building to visit or work". It is a calm place, raised above the humming streets, but not a dead one.