{"id":188151,"date":"2025-12-12T15:33:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T15:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/188151\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T15:33:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T15:33:07","slug":"like-lipstick-on-a-fabulous-gorilla-the-barbicans-many-gaudy-glow-ups-and-the-one-to-top-them-all-barbican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/188151\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Like lipstick on a fabulous gorilla\u2019: the Barbican\u2019s many gaudy glow-ups and the one to top them all | Barbican"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Barbican<\/a> is aptly named. From the Old French barbacane, it historically means a fortified gateway forming the outer line of defence to a city or castle. London\u2019s Barbican marks the site of a medieval structure that would have defended an important access point. Its architecture was designed to repel. Some might argue, as they stumble out of Barbican tube station and gaze upwards, not much has changed in the interim.<\/p>\n

The use of the word \u201cbarbican\u201d was in decline in this country until the opening in 1982 of the Barbican Arts Centre. Taking 20 years to build, it completed the modernist megastructure of the Barbican Estate, grafted on to a huge tract of land devastated by wartime bombing. The aim was to bring life back to the City through swish new housing, energised by the presence of culture. Nonetheless, the arts centre, the elusive minotaur at the heart of the concrete labyrinth, was always farcically difficult to locate. To this day, visitors are obliged to trundle along the Ariadne\u2019s thread of the famous yellow line, inscribed in what seemed like an act of institutional desperation, across concrete hill and dale.<\/p>\n

The Barbican is one of the most important postwar developments in the country \u2013 if not the worldThe Twentieth Century Society<\/p>\n

The minotaur is also ageing. Just like people, buildings also physically decay and get into bad habits, necessitating the odd hip replacement or hair transplant. Approval has now been granted by the City of London Corporation for a multi-million-pound programme to upgrade and transform the Barbican, in time for the 50th anniversary of its opening in 2032. From June 2028, it will close its doors for a year<\/a> to undergo the most ambitious makeover in its history. There will be a fair few architectural equivalents of hip replacements.<\/p>\n

A digital rendering of the renewed foyer. Photograph: Kin Creatives<\/p>\n

The Grade II-listed complex suffers from leaks, crumbling fabric, outdated services and accessibility issues. Navigability is a perpetual bugbear<\/a>, with apocryphal tales of famous people (including a celebrated explorer) getting lost in the cat\u2019s cradle of walkways, decks and staircases, conceived by its architects, Chamberlin Powell & Bon, in an era when such things were seen as exciting and novel.<\/p>\n

Sectional drawings made at the time show the building as a heroic, concrete layer cake, sprung from the imagination of a modern Piranesi, with levels stacked around the cavernous volumes of the concert hall and theatre. Most heroic of all is the conservatory, which took the void around the theatre fly tower, enclosed it in glass and filled it with plants. In the refurbishment proposals, this hugely popular urban greenhouse, a Kew Palm House for the East End, will be spruced up and made more accessible to the public.<\/p>\n

Over time, the Barbican\u2019s fortunes have fluctuated, but now, in the manner of the structure it was named after, it has successfully defended itself from public opprobrium, swatting away squeals of \u201cconcrete monstrosity\u201d to become a kind of architectural national treasure. You can buy Barbican mugs, models, tea towels and other ephemera valorising its uncompromising brutalist heft.<\/p>\n

Concrete hill and dale \u2026 the Barbican Centre\u2019s current Silk Street entrance. Photograph: Dion Barrett<\/p>\n

Remedial strategies have been tried before. In the early 1990s, Theo Crosby of design group Pentagram introduced some ill-advised pointillist stippling, along with gilded fibreglass statues, all contrived to \u201csoften\u201d the concrete. Derided as \u201cfeeble tinkering\u201d by Geoffrey Powell, one of the original architects, it was a decidedly unflattering smear of lipstick on a rather fabulous gorilla.<\/p>\n

A subsequent rebranding and remodelling by modernist fanboys Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) went slightly better, allowing the uncompromising brutalist heft to speak for itself, but below stairs, things were creaking and leaking, and have now got to the point where doing nothing is not an option.<\/p>\n

Kew Palm House heads east \u2026 a render of the Barbican Renewal. Photograph: Kin Creatives<\/p>\n

Fears that the Barbican would be \u201cstarchitect-ified\u201d by its latest glow-up appear unfounded. This is a \u201cfabric first\u201d approach, concerned with diligently making good, decarbonising, and fitting for the future \u2013 now common architectural practice for buildings of this size and significance. The overhaul will be overseen by Allies and Morrison along with Asif Khan Studio, which will collectively be thoughtful, steady hands on the tiller; just what an ageing minotaur needs. Turner prize-winners Assemble will get a crack at sorting out the wayfinding, though it\u2019s probably impossible to improve on the yellow line. In short, the Barbican will become more like the Barbican.<\/p>\n

The only blot on the escutcheon concerns possible new neighbours. Plans have been submitted for two new 20-storey towers on Silk Street, directly across from the arts centre, to replace an outdated 1980s office block. Designed by American architects SOM, the hulking, Jenga-esque extrusions will loom imperiously over the Barbican\u2019s east end, like a pair of corpulent bouncers. Residents\u2019 groups and heritage bodies are vigorously opposing the development in its present form. \u201cThe Barbican is one of the most important postwar residential and cultural developments in the country, if not the world,\u201d says Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, \u201cand its status as a prominent, architecturally outstanding London landmark should be respected as much as the fabric itself.\u201d It seems the Barbican may still have some repelling to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Barbican is aptly named. From the Old French barbacane, it historically means a fortified gateway forming the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-188151","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}