The Barbican Estate sampler

The Barbican Estate

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Penthouse and Pavement Charles Holland

Gropius wrote a book on grain silos Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes And Charlotte Perriand brought a new object to the office every morning.

But today we collect ads.

Alison and Peter Smithson ‘But Today We Collect Ads’, Ark, 1956

During the time I lived in the Barbican’s Shakespeare Tower, I joined the residents’ association. Meetings would invariably end with drinks at a member’s apartment offering the chance to indulge in every Barbican resident’s favourite hobby: working out which flat type it was and whether it had an original kitchen. The first time this happened I was momentarily bewildered by the flat I visited, unable to work out what had been done to it. The plan was initially disorientating and bore little relation to my own ostensibly identical home.

It took a while before I realized that the owner had filled in the balconies, claiming an extra two or three metres along two edges of the flat’s perimeter.

The dining alcove had been removed too, resulting in a vast L-shaped space, with a kitchen marooned in its centre.

But that wasn’t all. The interior had been decorated in a faux-Regency style with plaster swags and swirls on pink-striped wallpaper, ornate sideboards and decorative chinaware. And there was something else. The familiar arched fire escape door had disappeared, obscured by a fake fireplace. The owner revealed that – in the event of a fire – the escape route involved knocking through a cardboard wall and climbing through the fireplace itself.

It would be easy to regard this makeover as an isolated aberration, a travesty of the architects’ original intentions. Or perhaps as an unintentionally surreal commentary: how absurd that someone could so spectacularly miss the architectural point. Equally, though, one could make a case for this flat as an example of the adaptability of Barbican apartments, a rebuke to those that would see brutalism as an inflexible, totalizing aesthetic.

David Heathcote’s history of the estate, Barbican: Penthouse Over the City, claims that the estate’s architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon anticipated a variety of occupants with differing tastes and intended the flats to be open to adaptation.

The book includes a number of photographs of heavily transformed interiors to illustrate this point. But the idea of flexible and adaptable layouts conflicted, as Heathcote admits, with a number of other aspects of the design including levels of prefabrication and standardization.

To examine this further, it is important to understand the context in which the Barbican was developed and the kind of residents it was aimed at.

The Barbican was the second estate designed by Chamberlin Powell and Bon 45

↓ P.119 — 125 TYPE 35

Type 35 — penthouse

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Type 119 — sub-podium

↓ P.203 —208 TYPE 118

Type 118 — sub-podium

202

The Barbican Estate is one of London’s most recognizable landmarks, with its three towers among the city’s tallest residential spaces. In designing urban housing of such magnitude architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon took on a hugely ambitious task, which took over 30 years to complete.

The complex — comprising over 140 different flat and house types, outdoor spaces, gardens, and an arts centre — was post-war planning on a grand scale, and is now recognized as a world-class piece of brutalist architecture.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the estate and includes detailed plans for each of the flat types, along with beautiful photography of the building’s exteriors and interiors. Interviews with Barbican residents and employees, past and present, give a rare insight into how life on the estate has changed over the decades.

ARCHITECTURE

UK £40.00 US $45.00 Can $60.95

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