‘Like lipstick on a gorgeous gorilla’: Barbican’s many delightful glows and the one that tops them all | Barbican

TThe Barbican is aptly named. From Old French BarbacanHistorically, it means a fortified gate that forms the outer line of defense of a city or castle. The Barbican in London marks the site of a medieval structure that would have defended an important access point. Its architecture is designed to repel. Some might argue, when they emerge from Barbican Tube station and look up, that not much has changed in the meantime.

The use of the word ‘Barbican’ was in decline in this country until the opening of the Barbican Arts Center in 1982. It took 20 years to build, completing the massive modern construction of the Barbican Estate, which had been grafted onto a large area of ​​land destroyed by wartime bombing. The aim was to bring life to the city through luxurious new housing, invigorated by the presence of culture. However, the location of the Arts Centre, that elusive minotaur at the heart of the concrete maze, has always been difficult to locate. To this day, visitors are still forced to walk along Ariadne’s famous yellow line, carved in what seemed like an act of institutional desperation, through concrete hills and valleys.

The Minotaur is also getting older. Just like humans, buildings also degrade physically and turn into bad habits, necessitating a hip replacement or hair transplant. The City of London Corporation has now gained approval for a multi-million pound program to upgrade and transform the Barbican Hotel, in time for the 50th anniversary of its opening in 2032. From June 2028, the hotel will close its doors for a year to undergo the most ambitious refurbishment in its history. There will be quite a few architectural equivalents of hip replacement.

The Grade II listed complex is plagued by leaks, crumbling fabric, outdated services and accessibility issues. Mobility is a constant concern, with apocryphal tales of famous people (including a famous explorer) getting lost in a cat’s cradle of corridors, decks and stairs, which the architects, Chamberlain Powell & Boone, conceived in an era when such things were seen as exciting and new.

Sectional drawings made at the time show the building as a heroic cake of concrete layer, emerging from a modern Piranesian imagination, with stacked levels around the cavernous volumes of the concert hall and theatre. Most heroic of all is the Conservatory, which took the space around the theater’s flying tower, surrounded it with glass and filled it with plants. In the regeneration proposals, this hugely popular urban hothouse, the Kew Palm House for the East End, will be beautified and made accessible to the public.

Over time, the Barbican Hotel’s fortunes have fluctuated, but now, in the manner of the structure after which it is named, it has successfully defended itself from public scorn, overcoming cries of “concrete brutalism” to become a kind of architectural national treasure. You can buy Barbican cups, mannequins, tea towels and other ephemera that enhance its brutal, unrelenting heaviness.

Therapeutic strategies have been tried before. In the early 1990s, Theo Crosby of the design group Pentagram introduced some ill-advised stippling, along with gilded fiberglass sculptures, all intended to “soften” the concrete. It was derided by Geoffrey Powell, one of the original architects, as a “weak patchwork,” and it was certainly an unattractive smear of lipstick on a rather adorable gorilla.

The subsequent rebranding and redesign by modernist fan Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) was done a little better, letting the brutal, relentless heaviness speak for itself, but under the stairs, things were creaking and leaking, and it had now reached the point where doing nothing was no longer an option.

Fears that the Barbican Hotel may be ‘designed for the stars’ with its recent flare appear to be unfounded. This is a “fabric first” approach, concerned with the hard work of making good things, decarbonizing and future-proofing – now common architectural practice for buildings of this scale and importance. The overhaul will be overseen by Allies and Morrison along with Asif Khan Studio, who will collectively be thoughtful and steady hands on the tiller; Just what an aging minotaur needs. Turner Assemble Prize winners will have a chance at the route selection process, although it is impossible to improve on the yellow line. In short, the Barbican will become more like a Barbican.

The only spot on the coat of arms concerns potential new neighbors. Plans have been submitted for two new 20-storey towers on Silk Street, directly opposite the Arts Centre, to replace an old 1980s office building. Designed by US architects SOM, the massive Jenga-esque pull-outs will loom large over the Barbican’s eastern end, like a pair of portly sentries. Residents groups and heritage bodies strongly oppose the development in its current form. “The Barbican is one of the most important post-war residential and cultural developments in the country, if not the world,” says Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society. “Its status as an architecturally distinctive landmark in London must be respected as much as the fabric itself.” It looks like the Barbican may still have some headhunting to do.