He designed one of Europe’s largest public housing estates and then he just disappeared into thin air. Where is he? Where did he go? Did he ever design again? And if he did not, why?
Austrian Architect Peter Hans Felix Trenton built my childhood home, The Aylesbury estate.
The Aylesbury estate is a post-war modernist council estate in Walworth, southeast London, built on a 60-acre site, and designed to house thousands after the devastation of the Second World War. However, during the end of completion, the monolithic builds were already referred to as ‘slums in the sky’ and gained a reputation for crime and poverty. Soon after this, during the early years of Blairism, Southwark Council decided to demolish the estate and replace it with private and mixed-tenure schemes, typical to the ‘gentrified’ schemes we see all over London.
I am one of thousands of people who have lived on the Aylesbury. After the regeneration scheme was introduced, I always wondered how Peter Trenton would feel about his design now becoming close to a near-distant memory, and the same goes for many other post-war housing architects like him, who have or are having to see their work demolished (let’s not forget the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens). I, for one, am completely devastated by the loss of my estate, so surely Trenton feels the same about his own work being demolished?
Trenton’s post-war utopian dream has now been deemed as the definition of dystopia by architectural critics, but maybe he knew all too well that this was going to, or in fact, bound to happen? One of the earliest residents of the estate considers this to be so.
‘The architect don’t live here, that’s the reason here, he wants to come and live here for a week, see his mistakes but he won’t’. – Taken from Oscar Newman’s documentary Defensible Space.
Perhaps Trenton criticised his own design before completion, prior to the ridicule from the government, Southwark council and the media. Maybe he knew his mistakes and made a run for it? There seems to be no trace of the Austrian Architect, not even an illustrated drawing of him. In fact, typing in ‘Hans Peter Felix Trenton’ only alludes to the existing images of the Walworth Estate, its historical revolution and sadly, the early renders of the regenerated proposal. The identity of Hans Peter Trenton is mysterious, similar to many post-war council housing architects who introduced council housing.
Did he want to escape from the housing aesthetics of its time? Well, British Post-War Council housing follows the recognisable principles of Le Corbusier’s work, notably Unité d’Habitation, and Aylesbury takes homage to this work in particular. Trenton’s work explores the repetition of clean, symmetrical lines and the centralisation of concrete. Almost ‘Alien’ to the old Victorian maisonettes which surrounded it. It was the definition of Post-war brutalism, a new design age of public housing in Europe. He followed a long list of public housing architects during the post-war reconstruction phase such as Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith who both designed the initial Park Hill council housing estate in Sheffield. In additional reading, Trenton appeared to have shared a similar aesthetic to the architects of the late Heygate Estate and the old Ferrier Estate. Both of which, oddly enough, have also vanished since the creation of their estates. Why was this the case?
The use of Large Panel Systems (LPS) and the undoubtable inaccuracies that came along with its construction directed to years of difficulty. The Aylesbury Estate was built in the midst of the Ronan Point building collapse (1968), which killed four people. The casualty governed red flags with this construction system in large scale public housing especially within the boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark where the Aylesbury is situated and more so where LPS was prominent. LPS led to decades of anxiety in the safety of housing and for its residents too. I believe local councils and architects during this period shared mirroring apprehensions, a quiet doubt at the back of their minds that possibly there would be a repeat of Ronan Point. I can only assume that Peter Trenton felt the same too and fled?
‘Behind the statistics lie households where three generations have never had a job…There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry’ – Taken from Tony Blair’s inaugural speech on the Aylesbury Estate.
Weirdly, Trenton did not visit the Aylesbury Estate after its fruition, but maybe he was scared to? Perhaps not by the inaccuracies of the architecture but the judgement of the ‘working class’ people who inhabited the estate? On personal reflection, I felt safe living on the estate and have fond memories of playing outside with my friends after the end of a school day but reading articles suggests the opposite, a more negative illusion of antisocial behaviour resulting from the early years of the estate’s birth with references to the history of council housing. Established by Tony Blair’s inaugural discourse which ultimately grouped the residents as delinquents and created a belief of poverty itself or coming from a working-class family being a crime (Ravetz, 2002, p.13).
I suppose the history of the estate was not all sunshine and rainbows as I assumed it was whilst I was a child and even now as an architecture student. The damaging critique of the ‘working classes’, the ideologies of resident behaviour, construction failures and the ‘marmite’ opinions of the aesthetic and so, to design public housing and being considered as a council housing architect at that time immediately came with decades worth of architectural ‘baggage’. I believe these ideologies and issues are still following housing architects today, and with clear reasoning, look back three years to the tragedies of Grenfell. There’s almost an unspoken caution with council housing for architects and, I believe, funnily enough, the council. So, there is a lot to suggest that possibly, Trenton felt the baggage whilst designing one of Europe’s largest public housing estates and never designed again?
Nonetheless, I suppose the search for Peter Hans Felix Trenton still continues…
