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I think Mr Sergison's comment regarding " a sad reflection of our profession" is somewhat misdirected. The sad reflection of our profession is a string of vocal starchitects advocating RHG as "seminal" but not one of them prepared to provide honest commentary on RHG obvious social failings - failings that are not simply poor building maintenance. RHG is seminal in that it represents one of the many, many heroic failures of modernist housing ideas that still blight the public's very dim view of our profession. Its getting hard to listen to the hypocrisy of forked tongued architects or commentators that on one hand believe wholeheartedly in the transformative power of architecture on the other hand blame RHG failings entirely on everything BUT the architecture.

Of all recently threatened or in fact destroyed brutalist icons - RHG is the least worthy of saving but the one we all hear about most due to its London location and darling status of its designers. We have seen the destruction of brutalist giants from Luder, Madin and the like with relatively little brouhaha and the gutting and desecration of one of the best examples – the Ulster Museum only a muted campaign to preserve. These examples are more concerning as they are public buildings, integral to the histories of our urban areas, that do in fact perform their brief and are essential elements of our country's post war history. They do not represent high handed social engineering that characterized many housing schemes of this type. Housing is different - not only its functionality and its aesthetics but the massive social legacy that it creates and the negative imagery bad examples propagate. RHG is bad for architecture and bad for residents.

I do agree it could be refurbished or reused like Park Hill rather than destroyed but this could only work if it could be transformed into a high-worth residential scheme and unfortunately you can't pick it up and move it a few postcodes west… And who’s to suggest anyway that a competition to replace wouldn’t come up with something much, much better! After all our profession has surely learned the lessons of RHG…

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