This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

An eight-tonne fragment of one of London’s most notorious housing estates is poised to be a star exhibit at one of the world’s leading architecture festivals.

The V&A will transport a recently demolished concrete section from Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London, to the Venice Architecture Biennale.

It will be delivered by barge to the biennale’s Arsenale site, where it will be reassembled on an outdoors scaffold, allowing visitors to stand on an original “street in the sky” – the elevated deck that was optimistically meant to foster healthy interaction between neighbours.

Olivia Horsfall Turner, co-curator of the exhibit, said she expected it to stop people in their tracks. “It is obviously something that is very strange – it will look quite bizarre to see this fragment in Venice less than 50 years after it was constructed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A model of the Robin Hood Gardens fragments as they will look supported by scaffolding Photograph: muf architecture art

But she hoped it would prompt people to look again at the architects’ original ideals and how “they can inform and inspire current thinking”.

Robin Hood Gardens, completed in 1972, was the only social housing estate designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, two of the most important brutalist architects. They regarded it as so significant that, at the 1976 Venice Biennale, they displayed a billboard-sized photograph of the estate and a bench based on one of the building’s columns.

In the catalogue they spoke of it being a “ruin in reverse”, which has given curators a name for the new presentation.

Co-curator Christopher Turner said: “We plan to bring a small section of the ruin that Robin Hood Gardens has now become back to Venice to look at the original vision and what we might learn for the future of social housing from the Smithsons’ long engagement with the issue.”

The estate was the culmination of more than 20 years of research into social housing by the Smithsons. It was intended as a more enjoyable way of living, “a model, an examplar, of a new mode of urban organisation”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The deck of Robin Hood Gardens in about 1970. Photograph: Smithson Family Collection

But a chronic lack of maintenance and high crime rates made it an often miserable place to live and most of its residents supported its demolition, first announced in 2008. Controversially, English Heritage said it failed “as a place for human beings to live” and did not warrant protection.

Not yet fully demolished, it is being replaced by a £300m scheme containing more than 1,500 new homes.

Demolition began last year which is why the V&A moved to salvage fragments, something the museum has been doing since it was founded. It joins the 17th-century timber facade of Sir Paul Pindar’s house in Bishopsgate, east London, and the gilded music room saved from Norfolk House in St James Square, south-west London.

The museum has two fragments, one of which includes the gutted interior of a maisonette. It is the other, 8.8 metres high and 5.6 metres wide, which is heading to Venice.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Robin Hood Gardens estate in 2010. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Turner said the original buildings were constructed from pre-cast concrete segments from Sweden that were then jigsawed together on site: “Essentially it is like an Ikea piece of furniture.”

In Venice, the concrete will be reassembled on a scaffold designed by Arup, which engineered the original building.

It will be presented in the Pavilion of Applied Arts and be seen alongside a new work by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh who, on a 13-metre wide screen, will present a panoramic record of the estate’s architecture and interiors before they are torn down.

• Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin in Reverse is at the Venice Architecture Biennale from 26 May to 25 November