The enthusiasm with which Britain and France took to the construction of Mid-Century Modern social housing is equaled only by their present appetite for its demolition. In 2003, the French government announced a 10-year urban-renewal plan in which 200,000 dwellings would be replaced; in Britain, Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens, completed in London in 1972, is one of many projects that once enjoyed international prestige and are now facing the wrecking ball. But an alternative course is plotted by the rehabilitation of two 1960s buildings'the 170-foot-tall Bois-le-Pr'tre in the northwest of Paris, extended by Lacaton & Vassal and Fr'd'ric Druot, and Park Hill, a Brutalist megastructure in Sheffield, in the north of England, where architects Hawkins\Brown and Studio Egret West have completed the first phase of a comprehensive renovation.

Park Hill, Sheffield, England