Thinking with the Barbican

On a recent trip to London, I had the pleasure of hanging out for half a day at the Barbican, the famed Brutalist residential estate in the heart of The City. My wife Ashley and I took a 90-minute tour of the site with an excellent guide, after which I sat outside at the café attached to the performing arts center while Ashley plundered the gift shop. We had visited the estate back in 2010, so it was exciting to return some 15 years later. It hadn't changed much at all.

The Barbican was made possible by the bombs of the Luftwaffe, which destroyed a large section of Cripplegate in The City--the historic heart of London. While The City today glitzes with global financial wealth and power, when the bombs fell in the 1940s it was a smoky tangle of iron foundries, workshops, warehouses, and working-class families living in back street tenements. After the war, the site stood vacant until the late 1950s, when the Corporation of the City of London decided to transform the Cripplegate area into a large residential estate. It took many years to reconfigure the site because train lines had to be sorted, but by 1965 everything was ready.

Main reflecting pool of The Barbican, with hanging plants evoking Babylon, while 'towers in the park' rise in the background. The Barbican Centre, completed in 1982, is at the right of the image.

Designed by Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, and owned by the Corporation of the CIty of London, The Barbican emerged between 1965 and 1982 as an intricate ensemble of residential buildngs, elevated walkways, staircases, and reflecting pools stretched across 35 acres of prime London land. Its 2000 flats range from small studios to two bedroom apartments and three bedroom maisonettes. Initially offered as rentals for middle-class families and professionals, the complex pivoted almost entirely to owner occupation under Thatcher's neoliberal "Right to Buy" policy. Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon were inspired by ancient sources such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as well as the Modernist vision instantiated in Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation. The result was a residential urban landscape of remarkably expressive form, mixed scale, and human warmth and affordance.

Brutalist architecture in an expressive landscape, looking Northwest from Andrews House toward Cromwell Tower, with the Guildhall School. of Music and Drama on the lower right.

Notoriously, however, The Barbican also recapitulated its ancient role as a fortress (a Barbican is a defensive tower). From Roman Londonium to the Medieval city, the London Wall and its many gates kept invading armies at bay. Now Cripplegate was once more a bulwark, this time in the form of a residential estate fortified against incursion by the messy, industrial, working-class city. The Barbican presents seemingly impenetrable walls to the outside world, completely cutting it off from the city that surrounds it and presenting a radical disjuncture in the urban fabric. This was by no means a requirement of large Modern estates in the 1960s and 1970s; many were built in ways that defied the street plan but remained porous and connected, addressing the streets around them through architecture and site plan.

The Barbican glimpsed from outside along Golden Lane. The perimeter of the estate was deliberately designed to be illegible to everyone but those who lived there.

Two estates constrcuted around the same time as the Barbican, but with much greater porosity and convial address of the street. Left: Dawes House at Falcom Road Estate, Battersea. Right: Tachbrook Estate, Pimlico.

As a spatial researcher, I do my best to suppress my inner grouch when I write about architecture and urbanism. After all, how relevant are my normative views about this or that bit of space or place? We are awash in a never-ending tsunami of opinions about what makes 'good' urbanism or 'bad' urbanism. Still, I cannot help but to agree with critics of The Barbican who regard it as a self-isolating program, a form crafted to sit apart from its context, aloof from the warp and woof of the everyday urban landscape. Even more than Corbu himself, the architects of the Barbican managed to materialize the functionalist, multilevel, tower-in-the-park landscape devoid of the grime and class conflict of the old city--a vision that exercised the Modernist imaginary.

And yet despite these criticisms, I am delighted to have the Barbican in the world. This is not simply down to my proclivity for Brutalist architecture, but rather because it is unlikely that such a complex will ever be built again in London; it is in every way a product of its moment. Facing inward, it is a superb architectural ensemble. Facing outward, it is a hostile barricade against the city that surrounds it. That two such contradictory impulses can be compassed within one program is compelling. The Barbican is an essay in what is possible to create in the urban context, and at the same time a cautionary tale about how grand designs relate or do not relate to their contexts. More to the point, we should never wish for our cities to reflect any one particular vision of 'good urbanism.' We can reject the Barbican as a template even as we we enjoy it, learn from it, contrast it with other visions. We need a thousand flowers blooming. The Barbican is one of those flowers.

Whatever one thinks about the content of 'good urbanism,' the actually existing urban condition is an incredibly diverse, layered, multifacted assemblage of architectural and spatial forms--some great, some ok, some poor, some terrible. Our vision of urbanism should not require every patch to follow the same rules, or to emerge out of a uniform set of codes governing volume, aesthetics, and land use. One can appreciate The Barbican even while content that its insular, fortress-like form need not be replicated. In other words, rather than regarding the Barbican as 'anti-urban,' as many critics do, we might regard it instead as one version of urbanism, one argument for the urban future, one way to build a city. We don't have to agree with it. But we can admire it for all of its flaws.

The street above the street. The Barbican is transected with paths, skywalks, and staircases that form an interconnected pedestrian transit system. Beech Street, shown here, is a grand boulevard in the Paris style, carried by the Barbican above the borough's narrow twisting lanes and alleys.