Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
The UK's Housing and Communities Secretary Michael Gove has approved the planned demolition of the Museum of London building and Bastion House near the Barbican. The go-ahead makes way for the revised Sheppard Robson and Diller Scofidio + Renfro-led scheme that would deliver a new office... View full entry
The revised Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Sheppard Robson-led scheme at the Barbican in Central London reportedly gained planning approvals from the City of London’s planning body. The news came last week (April 17th) after UK Housing and Communities Secretary Michael Gove remanded an Article... View full entry
The Barbican has debuted a new large-scale public art installation from Ghanaian-born artist Ibrahim Mahama. His site-specific piece Purple Hibiscus, named in reference to the 2003 novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is installed on the facade of the Barbican’s central Lakeside... View full entry
The project as whole also creates a highly managed territory of the sort that you tend to get in single-owner developments which, despite some funky moves by a Frank Gehry-designed apartment block, is fundamentally predictable. It threatens to cage the beast that is Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece, as might the array of retail logos inside. But, between the blandscape outside and the brandscape within, the power station is cussed enough to assert its own character. — The Guardian
The £9 billion final boss of Greater London adaptive reuse projects (along with the Barbican) is a story of inside and out for Moore, who sees the program’s housing element as an “awkward” mismatch when compared to WilkinsonEyre’s tastefully “sober” and restrained interior retail... View full entry
A trio of concerned letter writers replied to a March 31st opinion piece by The Guardian’s Owen Hatherley in which the critic declared that “hardline modern architecture is now something of a cult.” “A living city has to strike some sort of balance between avoiding the strangulation and... View full entry
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. Previously on Archinect: City of London... View full entry
One of the most important renewal projects in recent memory is a step closer to being realized in central London. The city’s development corporation has officially revealed its competition shortlist of design partners for the highly-publicized Barbican Centre revamp. Five teams were... View full entry
Scrapped plans for a new concert hall in London are getting a much-needed reset thanks to an updated design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Sheppard Robson. The pair originally was set to design the hall as part of a scheme sponsored by the Barbican and London Symphony Orchestra to... View full entry
Today, The Barbican, along with the London Symphony Orchestra and Guildhall School of Music & Drama, released images of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed London Centre for Music. DS+R was first announced as lead architect for the project back in 2017, and teamed up with Sheppard Robson... View full entry
The viability of building a major new concert hall in London has been widely debated, and the future of the Center was thrown into doubt last November, when the British government withdrew its commitment to contribute 5 million pounds (about $6.4 million) to pay for a business plan. The City of London Corporation stepped in with 2.5 million pounds (about $3.2 million) to allow project to go ahead. — NY Times
The shortlist for the future home for the London Symphony Orchestra and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was announced on Monday and consists of AL_A, Foster + Partners, Renzo Piano, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Gehry Partners, Snohetta, all of which have extensive experience working on... View full entry
The museum is planning to move from its present landlocked home within the Barbican with no entrance at street level, into a cathedral-sized space, using the abandoned Victorian general market at Smithfield, next door to the famous meat market.
“Our job is to make this the best museum in the world,” Ament said, carefully stepping around pigeon droppings and pools of water in the old market, which has been empty for the last 30 years while developers and conservationists fought over its fate.
— theguardian.com
The Museum of London have high expectations and high hopes for this monumental space, set to open it's doors in 2021. There is even a working train line running through the central space, a feature Ament is desperately keen to keep. Read more on London projects here:Shortlist for new Museum of... View full entry
Plans for London’s first timber skyscraper were presented to the Mayor of London Boris Johnson this week with researchers saying natural materials were “vastly underused”.
The design is for an 80-storey, 300m-high wooden building integrated into the Barbican complex. The tower would create 1,000 new residences. Architects’ Journal described the concept scheme as “toothpick-like”.
— independent.co.uk
Read relating articles on Archinect here:A guide to London mayoral candidates and their housing policiesIs London experiencing a brick boom?Design revealed for 1 Undershaft, London's tallest skyscraper by the "thinking developer’s architect" View full entry
As a new exhibition at the Barbican in London shows, by the mid 1950s [Charles and Ray Eames] were producing films and multimedia presentations that are as much part of their formal and intellectual legacy as their furniture or the glass-walled Eames house itself. [...]
the Eameses never conceived of the hundred or so films they made as movies per se, or even as experimental films. “They’re just attempts to get across an idea,” Charles claimed
— theguardian.com
Watch a select few of the Eames' "hundred or so" films below: "House" (1955): "Tops" (1969): "Powers of 10" (1977): View full entry
Thirty years ago, the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri complained that pictures of well-known buildings were often as conventional and flat as mediocre still-life paintings "but executed out of doors." [...]
The new architectural photography exhibition at the Barbican, "Constructing Worlds," sets out, as Ghirri himself did in shooting buildings by the architect Aldo Rossi, to explore another approach [...]. Something very different, in other words, from "maximum clarity."
— latimes.com
At the Barbican Center in London, the Curve gallery is an example of an unusually shaped art space in the middle of a traditional, rectiform center. Its 90-degree curved design, wrapping around the back of the performing arts center's main hall, has been by turns a challenge and a blessing, and its function continues to evolve even after 30 years' experience. — nytimes.com
