On the Barbican — Chamberlin Powell and Bon's postwar experiment in urban living, and what it looks like from the inside
The Barbican was conceived as a replacement city for an area of London that the Blitz had left as rubble. It opened in stages between 1969 and 1982, by which point the architectural style it had been designed in was already unfashionable.
The Barbican was conceived as a replacement city for an area of London that the Blitz had left as rubble. The City of London Corporation commissioned Chamberlin Powell and Bon in 1955, and the complex opened in stages between 1969 and 1982, by which point the architectural style it had been designed in was already unfashionable. This was always going to be its condition: built as a utopian gesture toward a postwar idea of urban community, arriving just in time for that idea to be declared a failure. The Barbican has spent the subsequent decades being the most controversial piece of architecture in London, which has kept it more interesting than most buildings that are simply admired.
The structure is a concrete city built on a raised podium level, with the street grid running beneath it. The residential towers — Cromwell Tower, Lauderdale Tower, and Shakespeare Tower — rise above the podium and contain over two thousand residential units still occupied by Londoners who have, in some cases, lived there for decades. The lakeside walks, the conservatory, and the route from Barbican Station to the arts centre — a route marked with a yellow line painted on the podium level, because the complex is genuinely labyrinthine — give the place its particular character: simultaneously public and residential, civic and private.
The Barbican Arts Centre, the principal cultural institution within the complex, is London's largest multi-arts venue. The concert hall is home to the London Symphony Orchestra; the theatres have housed the Royal Shakespeare Company. The cinema screens an independent programme with the curatorial seriousness that marks it as an institution that understands its audience. The arts centre does not require a ticket to enter: the foyer, the lakeside bar, and the several levels of interior public space are accessible without payment and without an agenda.
The conservatory on the third floor of the Barbican Centre is the most surprising room in the complex. It contains two thousand species of tropical plants in a glass-roofed space that opens only at specific hours on weekend afternoons. The scale of the planting — full-size palms, waterfall features, fish pools — inside a building that presents itself externally as unrelenting concrete creates the exact contrast that the Barbican's architects were, perhaps, aiming for throughout the larger scheme. It is free to enter and almost never crowded.
The Barbican's reputation for navigational difficulty is not entirely undeserved, but it is partly a function of arriving with a destination. The complex rewards wandering. The podium level — above the traffic, below the towers — connects the residential terraces, the lakeside, the arts centre, and the gardens in a sequence that takes about forty minutes to walk without purpose. The yellow line leads to the arts centre. Everything else is arrived at by accident, which is the correct way to arrive at most things worth seeing.