Let’s leave at sunrise, let’s live by the ocean

Another Partial Success posted a photo:

It's black background and large innit?

So here we are at the Barbican development in the heart of London – I have a love/hate relationship with the Barbican since I love the architecture and the cohesive design across a vaste area, but I dislike it for the high position it holds in the architectural ranking (it’s Grade II listed)… it seems unreasonable that it the same genre of Brutalism should be condemned elsewhere for no reason other than “it’s not the Barbican”.

Baynard House is one example of the same genre as the Barbican but was described by George Ferguson of the Royal Institute of British Architects as "more akin to a car park than an office building" – he disliked it so much that he wanted it included in the so-called "Grade X" listing of buildings which should be demolished. At the same time George is campaigning to preserve the Barbican against the proposed development on the site of St Alphage House…. clearly a man inclined to level-headed thinking and avoiding extremes he’s quoted as saying “Canary Wharf is there to take these bloody great buildings out of the City of London, much as La Défense does for Paris”.

So three cheers for saving St Alphage House and the surrounds, but yah boo sucks for disliking Baynard House.

Anyway… the picture is from one of the walkways which curve up to the high-level piazza at the north of the site towards the Golden Lane Estate, which was kind of a pilot-phase for the whole thing – it’s rather pleasing to see curves of this type in the Barbican as the patterns on the brick floor are quite a treat. I should note that while taking this I was approached by a security guard who told me to bugger off – when I asked what the problem was his conclusion, after some discussion, was that I could have been a terrorist gathering information… his opinion is that compact cameras aren’t used by nasty people, so tourists are OK. Crumpled logic.

The Barbican estate was built between 1965 and 1976 on what was a huge 35 acre bomb site – old pictures show a wasteland of nothingness. It was designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon who had already built the Golden Lane Estate mentioned above and is now a site of special architectural interest for its scale, its cohesion and the ambition… and it is truly awesome in scale and is one of the few places you can see a theme carried out to completion.

The 1950’s saw developments focus on precincts – people areas with shops around the edges, but these inevitably required service roads which invariably ended up being grotty, dingy hideaways for n’er do wells. The Barbican is and example of the change in thinking to vertical development – cars at the bottom, along with carparks and service areas, then the people space for walking around and finally the housing/offices. While it’s nice that people are placed above cars it did lead to somewhat barren pedestrian areas which in many cases turned into grotty, dingy hideaways for n’er do wells again, particularly on the walkways.

However the Barbican escaped this fate, probably because it’s maintained so well and houses wealthy people – the flats change hands for megabucks and I would imagine the service-charge runs into several thousand a year… which is why they can afford to polish and stroke the brick floors so nicely; leading us back to the subject of the photograph above.

Taken early shmurly, hence the blue light visible on the flats on the right.

Enjoy.