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The City’s Brutalist cross-patch

One of the finest examples of an architectural style we now call ‘Brutalism’, the Barbican still is an eye catcher amidst the more recent glass and steel constructions of London’s City. Not only the monotonous grey concrete slabs of the residential towers makes the development stand out. It is one of the very few exclusively housing developments in the City’s Cripplegate area, with the inner court yards forming an oasis of serenity in comparison to the surrounding streets, filled with white collar workers and commuters rushing to their offices and lunch meetings. However, this serenity was not the aim of the Barbican’s design; the 1950s perspectives envisaged bustling deck-levels and busy thoroughfares. But the plastic figures that enlivened the models of the architects never materialized: all we have today is geometry.

Geometry was certainly not a characteristic of the Cripplegate area before the Barbican redevelopment was commenced. Heavily bombed during the Second World War, Cripplegate was a disorderly wasteland of slums in the 1950s inhabited by only a few dozen. The Blitz had caused a severe loss of life in the quarter, and left most buildings uninhabitable. In 1957 the London City Council decided that the area should be extensively redeveloped. The architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon were asked for the job, and they took their work seriously. Their plans envisaged the largest performing arts centre in Europe, and living space for four thousand Londoners, the rich as well as the poor. The first estates were opened in 1969.

The spaciousness of the Barbican was exhilarating when compared to the claustrophobic packed streets of the City, but spaciousness is mere space if the crowds don’t take it. To quote Lionel Esher: ‘Footsteps echo down interminable perspectives, scary after dark, and the pools and the cascades, so pretty on a drawing, feature the usual muck and scum.’ Besides, when the estates were opened the modernist ‘tower-and-podium’ ideology was already outdated; during the 1970s small lanes and esoteric short-cuts were gradually considered more suitable for the human scale. From its opening, the Barbican was heavily criticized for its oppressiveness and sombre, grey outlooks.

Today the Barbican still stirs debate. The British government put it on its preservation list in 2001, while at the same the centre was voted as the ugliest building of London. Nonetheless, the court yards of the center remain a refuge for City workers, and the vast dimensions of the development can do nothing but cause awe and amazement - written out considerations of aesthetic and livability. Also, The Barbican must be seen as the product of a time when housing development in London’s city centre was not yet solely controlled by market prices and foreign investors, as proven by the mixed social class of its current inhabitants. In this light the documentary ‘London Utopia’ may be a recommendation.

© Courtesy of Tim Verlaan