I had a little walk around the Barbican complex earlier.

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BucketBucket Frets: 7751
edited July 2017 in Off Topic
Took some photos.

http://i.imgur.com/ztNYKk3.jpg
^ (Standing under Defoe House, just above Lambert Jones Mews, looking over the residents' garden toward Thomas More House)

http://i.imgur.com/HkPcPCz.jpg
^ (Another angle showing more of Lambert Jones Mews, my favourite part of the estate)

http://i.imgur.com/gSD0doj.jpg
^ (Cromwell Tower)

http://i.imgur.com/Lwr4i3m.jpg
^ (Further along the walkway under Defoe House, looking back towards Lauderdale Tower)

http://i.imgur.com/i0PDB9O.jpg
^ (On the lakeside terrace, looking towards the remarkable Gilbert House)

http://i.imgur.com/8myW5gM.jpg
^ (Looking up at Speed House)

It really is a fantastic place.

I love that it's mostly elevated above street level, and relatively secluded - it's like an oasis in the middle of the busy city. It's so quiet and calm, with beautiful gardens and that lake in the middle. Once "inside" the estate, the roads surrounding it are all blocked out of sight and are generally out of earshot too - sometimes they are underneath the elevated platform, so there is a complete separation of people and road traffic. The architecture really gets me as well - the uniformity of it is really pleasing, and that it's such a massive development makes it all the more remarkable how cohesive it all is. Not everyone likes brutalism, I know, but I'm personally a fan and it's done so wonderfully here. There's nowhere else like it, really.

I'd only visited the complex once before, on a school trip a fair few years ago, and wasn't taken in by it. I found it quite intimidating in its sheer strangeness - but my tastes have changed and I've become very interested in the area in the last year or thereabouts, so I really wanted to go back. Miss Bucket and I were wandering around Spitalfields Market today and decided to take a look later in the afternoon - we both just fell in love with it. I'm a total geek for London's modernist architecture, the larger housing developments in particular, so I suppose it was inevitable.

Anyone else on here have an appreciation for the Barbican?
- "I'm going to write a very stiff letter. A VERY stiff letter. On cardboard."
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Comments

  • There's a great little film on YouTube about its construction. Produced in the late '60s by the London Corporation, or some organisation like that.
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  • mudslide73mudslide73 Frets: 3049
    Looks brilliant mate - I've seen it many times but never from the inside. There are so many carbuncles from that era that the great stuff gets overlooked. 

    Miles better than the non alcoholic lager that shared it's name too :)
    "A city star won’t shine too far"


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  • vizviz Frets: 10645
    You make a very good architectural photographer. 
    Roland said: Scales are primarily a tool for categorising knowledge, not a rule for what can or cannot be played.
    Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
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  • mellowsunmellowsun Frets: 2422
    edited July 2017
    Bucket said:


    Anyone else on here have an appreciation for the Barbican?
    Great photos!   Did you know that the texturing of the concrete was done by hand with small hammers? The amount of work and attention to detail that went into building the place was incredible.

    I lived in the Barbican for a few months, rented a flat there. Before then I was a bit obsessed with the place, less so now having spent time living there

    I'd live there again but I wouldn't want it to be my only residence (actually many residents use it as a pied-a-terre and have second homes in the country).

    I missed hearing birdsong and having a garden (although the communal gardens are nice), and apart from the hallowed inner sanctum of flats in Gilbert House (1 bed flats in which sell for £1million+ ), Shakespeare, Thomas More and Defoe, a large number of flats, at least at one end, overlook busy main roads so you can get constant traffic noise. Also, the estate is increasingly being hemmed in by tall office buildings being built around it, which have their lights on 24/7. This has particularly blighted Willoughby House.

    However, residents are generally well-behaved and quiet. You rarely hear your neighbours although people are friendly.

    In the winter flats can be cold, as the heating is centralised, so goes on and off at set times (it's really just meant to provide 'background' heating so you need to supplement with electric heaters). Flats are not double glazed so the glorious sliding picture windows do let in draughts.

    The services are great: you get your rubbish collected daily and car park attendants will hold parcels for you. If anything needs fixing, someone comes around to sort it out the same day. Yet service charges are relatively low, because the freehold is owned by a public corporation, so there is none of the service-charge and ground-rent gouging you get with private developments.

    As a piece of residential architecture, it is unrivalled in the UK, and is a beacon of hope about what could be done with housing: high density, publicly managed, yet high quality. Sadly, we'll never see another development like it again.
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  • martmart Frets: 5205
    viz said:
    You make a very good architectural photographer. 
    That's what I was thinking. @Bucket: you are JCon and ICM£5.
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  • prowlaprowla Frets: 4896
    I just saw the tower and thought I hope it's safe.
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  • fretmeisterfretmeister Frets: 23940
    edited July 2017
    Been there loads.

    My brother lives in it.
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  • SnapSnap Frets: 6256
    I've been a few times. I think its horrible, but then I'm not a fan of brutalist architecture at all. Here in Sheffield we have one of the most famous, Park Hill. Tbh, they epitomise everything I don't like about housing - bleak, ugly, depressing, cheap. AS a kid growing up in the 70s, these sort of places felt oppressive and grim. I understand their place in architectural and social history, but IMO they should all be demolished and replaced with fresher buidings.

    But then, its not for me to say, as I don't and have never lived in one.
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  • JalapenoJalapeno Frets: 6378
    I think it's the residents' planting of geraniums and hanging plants etc that have de-brutalised it.  Stayed at a firend's 2 bed flat there, very small inside for such a mental price.  I work on the South Bank - not a fan of weather stained concrete - but Barbican looks a lot nicer than most.
    Imagine something sharp and witty here ......

    Feedback
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  • chillidoggychillidoggy Frets: 17136
    "The Hanging Gardens of Barbican."


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  • SnapSnap Frets: 6256
    Jalapeno said:
    I work on the South Bank - not a fan of weather stained concrete - but Barbican looks a lot nicer than most.
    I was there only yesterday, having a v pleasant Sunday morning amble down the riverside, followed by a good couple of hours in the Tate. The buildings are indeed brutal! I don't like it - for me it sums up sloppy cheap ideas. It was the product of cheap mass building projects. It might be modish to praise brutalism, but I don't think it was that clever really.

    IMO, of course.

    Having said all that, there is something quite magisterial about the Tate Modern building. Its imperious.
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  • Winny_PoohWinny_Pooh Frets: 7732
    The best part is the indoor garden that usually only open on Sundays, Cactii collection is awesome. Coffee shops, free library (digital pianos free to play with headphones) and the cinema is great too.
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  • chillidoggychillidoggy Frets: 17136

    If you've never been, it's also worth having a stroll around Canary Wharf, particularly if, like me, you remember the Isle of Dogs and what that particular bomb-site looked like beforehand. The transformation is astonishing.


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