Blundering Barbican seeks to escape ‘brutalist’ image
NewsLondon’s Barbican Centre, which has just bid farewell to its last director Nicholas Kenyon in a no-masks drinks party, has posted an ‘an international competition for a major £50-to-150 million renewal’.
The aim is to ‘to transform the brutalist-era arts centre ‘to meet the needs of 21st-century artists, audiences and communities’.
Deadline for applications is October 21.
The new initiative comes seven months after the abandonment of plans to build a £500m+ concert hall.
In some circles brutalist architecture is revered.
The problem isn’t the architecture style — it’s that the facility is built like a fortress, where the gardens inside are essentially surrounded by walls and the entrances to the facility are practically hidden. Take the main entrance on Silk Street — in the history of performing arts centers, there’s probably never been an entranceway that was so intentionally diminutive. You could walk around the entire circumference of the Barbican and have little inkling of what’s actually inside.
By comparison, while Lincoln Center has it’s own fortress issues with the sides on Amsterdam Ave and 65th St, when you walk by it on Columbus Ave, the layout and design is extremely inviting to the public (and most practically, it’s obvious how you get in).
I was marginally late to see a Yuja Wang concert with the LSO at the barbican this year, and ran like a lunatic around the centre until I finally found the entrance (a side entrance since they’d blocked off the main one during peak-covid). The audience members sitting next to me must have thought I’d just come out from a marathon!
Its brutalist image is now a major selling point so I doubt this is about making it pretty, just making it work better.
Brutalism stems from…. the nazis’ archtecture of the ‘Atlantik Wall’, the military defence structure to keep out the allies. Its style was picked-up by Le Corbusier after WW II and became a symbol of ‘progress’ in modernist architecture.
This has been explored by architct Léon Krier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwSr8iZgN-s
Thank you for this YouTube clip. It very neatly puts together why I don’t like the exterior design of the Barbican and something psychologically wrong about the design choice: it seems as if it is designed to repel patrons seeking to enter into it… just as ‘Fortress Europe’ was. Fortunately both were overcome. Here’s hoping the Barbican can also be ‘overcome’.
I adore the Barbican and always have done. I get a bit worried when I hear the word ‘upgrade’ or ‘renewal’ – what exactly does this mean? I can understand that they might want to improve the eating facilities but I hope we don’t lose anything of what makes the space feel unique in terms of the architecture and aesthetic.
It is certainly unique.
Sometimes people got lost in its entrance trajectories and were never seen again.
some people went to margate
instead of moorgate.
the engineer of the barbican
told me this.
A small price to pay for the authenticity and charm of the “Barbican Experience”!
Good. It was obvious all along that there was more mileage in spending a bit of money on improving the Barbican, rather than ploughing on with a new hall that was never going to get finished.
Will the megamillions manage to iron thee wrinkles ut of the stick-back plastic they stuck over the orchestra canopy?
It would be a good start just to build additional toilets. You don’t need consultants to see the existing facilities have been inadequate for decades.
Is this initiative by the Corporation of the City of London an exercise in futility? I went onto various websites to try to get a good look at the Barbican Centre. Based on those sites, it would appear to be unredeemable. The exterior could double for a shopping arcade, a low-rent office block or an abattoir. I feel they can’t undo Brutalism any more than a chef can undo a dropped egg. Maybe they’ll have better luck on redoing the concert hall’s interior?
Are we to understand from your comment that you have never actually visited the place?
“Brutalism” = “Brute” = Literal Violence!
Re-word it to something more appealing like “Empowered Solidity.”
Six weeks to plan a £50-to-150 million project? What will be the usability of those plans?
They have probably already forewarned their chosen architect well in advance, and briefed him/her on what they really want, just like Boris did for Thomas Heatherwick when inviting bids for what became the proposal for a garden bridge. Advertising an ostensibly open competition or job vacancy with an impossible deadline is a well known tactic for getting away with nepotism.