The result was a beguiling cocktail – part bastion, part brutalist hanging gardens of Babylon – and it stood as the ultimate expression of the modern movement’s search for a monument.
The complexity of incorporating so many venues on so many levels across a 40-acre site has always made the place an infuriating labyrinth for the uninitiated, with successive decades of signage and way-finding strategies deployed in an attempt to ease the maze-like passageways.
— The Guardian
The Barbican’s important birthday comes ahead of next month’s revealing of the winner of the City of London Corporation-sponsored redevelopment contest. The Centre is celebrating with a weekend of special programming including a guest DJ’d after party.
Wainwright also managed to dig up an original review of the Barbican’s opening from 1982, which provides remarkable insights as to how the estate, which was first commissioned by the city’s Court of Common Council in 1957, was received by the media.
“The overpowering imagination, skill and effort which has gone into the 25-year project becomes apparent immediately,” The Aberdeen Press and Journal wrote at the time. “It is engrained in the pine-clad walls, the polished teak flooring, the subtle lighting, the overall design. In fact, the Barbican has been described as ‘a haven of cultural perfection in the midst of the City of London.’”
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