The Barbican laid bare: inside Londons most famous Brutalist housing estate
The ObserverInteriorsA new book of photographs by Anton Rodriguez captures the ‘cult of the Barbican’
When photographer Anton Rodriguez started his blog “Barbican Residents”, a through-the-keyhole tour of London’s celebrated Brutalist housing estate, it was as much to satisfy his curiosity about who his neighbours were and how their homes looked as anything. “I’d been living here four years,” he says, “and I’d walk through the corridors and see different residents, and I wondered what their apartments were like.”
It’s the exclusively designed elements that are fetishised the most by Barbican enthusiastsThe notice he put on the Barbican’s online forum seeking candidates for his project, however, was met with less enthusiasm than he’d anticipated. “People are quite private in the Barbican. A lot of them said: ‘You can photograph my apartment, but you can’t photograph me.’” It was those who were most evangelical about life in the Barbican who managed to overcome their camera-shyness. “They were really proud of their homes and had a lot to say about them.”
Now Rodriguez’s blog has become a book, Residents: Inside the Iconic Barbican Estate, a more comprehensive overview compiled from shots that didn’t make it online. And while the residents do indeed put in an appearance, it’s the interiors that dominate: a showcase of architecturally sensitive urban middle-class taste.
If these interiors tell us anything about the residents, it’s that they have a proclivity for furniture pretty much as you might expect of people who love the Barbican. But there are occasional rebellions against Modernist restraint: a golden glitter curtain here, ceiling-height prints pasted to the wall there. Those who live in the 22 flats featured in the book work in design, finance and marketing, but most of them in architecture. “Architects always say this is their dream place to live,” comments Rodriguez.
A relatively recent convert to the cult of the Barbican, Rodriguez grew up in Liverpool, and had been looking to move from his home in east London when he heard there was a flat going on the estate. His response: “OK – what’s the Barbican? But as soon as I saw it, I took it.”
He enthuses about its light-filled homes and the “easy way of living” that the architects designed into them, from the underfloor heating to “the little double-access cupboard next to the front door where you put your rubbish, which gets collected every day from outside by Barbican staff.”
It’s these exclusively designed elements that are subjected to the greatest degree of fetishisation by Barbican enthusiasts – gracefully minimal knobs on kitchen hobs, hand basins and mirrors built into wall recesses – and they are duly treated to their own black-and-white portraits at the end of the book. The love they inspire also accounts for the high number of these original features that still remain. “I’ve got an original kitchen,” Rodriguez says proudly, “white and stainless steel, 40 years old and in really good condition.”
Even though Rodriguez achieved his objective of getting to know his neighbours – one of them ended up designing the book – his project is ongoing. The Barbican contains more than 2,000 flats, making it the largest housing scheme in Europe on its completion in 1982, and Rodriguez says he’d like to photograph them all.
He’s looking beyond the concrete walls of the Barbican, too. Interiors from the Golden Lane estate next door, a model council-housing scheme which secured the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon the commission for the Barbican, have started to appear on his blog. “It could grow into a series of studies of Brutalist estates. There are others I really love, such as the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury.”
It would be a timely exercise, given that so many outstanding postwar council estates are in imminent danger of demolition, as shamefully betrayed as the working-class communities that live in them. “Back home in Liverpool there was plenty of Brutalist architecture around when I was a child,” says Rodriguez. “Now there’s none left and no photographs of it.” No such danger for the Grade II-listed Barbican though, whose residents recently launched a petition to further secure its preservation with conservation-area status.
Residents: Inside the Iconic Barbican Estate is published by The Barbican Centre, £30 (shop.barbican.org.uk)
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