London Festival of Architecture 2016: 60 years after John Leslie Martin completed the Fitzhugh Estate in London, photographer Sharon O'Neill visited to see if the project lived up to its promises (+ slideshow).
The Modernist housing estate in Wandsworth was designed by the late British architect as a blueprint for the future of housing in line with the "new social agenda", as laid out in his 1930s publication The Flat Book.
Today, it offers an insight into whether post-war housing meets the needs of the 21st-century family, and whether the ideals of architects like Martin are worth revisiting.
On show as part of the London Festival of Architecture exhibition Blueprint for Living, O'Neill's photographic series Flats offers a look inside some of the homes in the estate. In this essay, she describes her intentions.
The Flats series is a photographic exploration of one architect's vision of the "modern world" as told through the lives of the current inhabitants of one of his buildings.
Through a mixture of archive material and contemporary photographs, the series delves into the everyday world of the occupants of a council block designed and constructed in the mid-20th century.
Fitzhugh Estate photographed by Bill Toomey (1956). Image courtesy of the Architectural Press Archives/RIBA
The work attempts to frame the young architect's principles of Modernism from the perspective of his idealistic vision of the 1930s. Using the building and int...