Despite being defiantly untrendy, the Barbican worked remarkably well. Being on the edge of the financial centre of the City, it rapidly became a fashionable place for wealthy people to rent - and later buy - a flat. Security and maintenance (bankrolled by the City) was good, there were few if any social problems: this was anything but a standard council estate. Today, it seems amazing that the place was ever intended as a kind of social housing-cum-cultural quarter, a bravely utopian experiment. Amazing, too, that the arts centre should have been designed, as John Tusa nicely puts it, to look like Prague Airport.
Those enormous foyers with their endless changes of level and acres of brass balustrading and queasy carpet…they never worked. When architect Theo Crosby of Pentagram arrived to rework the public areas in the early 1990s, he was one confused architect, well past his prime and fatally hitched to the Prince Charles bandwagon. Crosby threw a bridge across the chasms of the foyers, but put it to one side rather than across the middle as logic would suggest. He also tried to make more of the centre’s entrances and route junctions, but chose to do this by the slightly bizarre method of giant gold-tinselly figures, including a row of Muses standing on a new canopy to the northern entrance. These were swiftly removed not long after John Tusa - whose office overlooks the canopy - took over as director in 1995.
Crosby was essentially an apostate - a modernist, of the same generation as the Barbican’s original architects, who had renounced the faith. Unfortunately he had little by way of an alternative ideology apart from slapping on inappropriate applied ornamentation (he had come to regard himself as a sculptor and patron of traditionalist artists). He was therefore all wrong not just for the Barbican, but also for his celebrated multi-discipline design group Pentagram, which loyally stuck by him to the end. He died not long after.
This wrongness for the job is emphatically not the case with the current generation of architects employed by the centre. These are - for the concert hall refurb - Caruso St. John, architects of the rightly acclaimed Walsall Art Gallery, and - for the new waterside café and public areas feasibility study - Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. They are very different architects, but they share one thing in common: they both love the original architecture of the Barbican. As with Tusa’s younger audiences, they have no problem with the place. On the contrary. They want to celebrate it.
The concert hall demonstrates that architects can work with a very demanding technical brief - working with acoustician Larry Kierkegaard as well as lighting and airconditioning engineers - to produce a thing of beauty. It was, says Peter St. John, a more difficult job than any they had previously tackled. From the audience, you do not see any of the immense effort that went into the £7 million upgrade. All you see is the succession of curving, aerofoil-like sound reflectors soaring from the back of the stage right up and across the ceiling of the room: a metaphor for the passage of sound which also serves the wholly practical purpose of directing and clarifying that sound.
These reflectors are clad in Rimex stainless steel - a process of acid-dipping that gives the surface the appearance of shot silk, its colours changing, from purple to gold, depending on how the light strikes it. These iridescent colours work very well with the timber interior of the hall, and with the upholstery colours of designer Robin Day’s famous - and famously comfortable - seating.
One hopes that the Barbican finds the time in its tight schedule (it runs to 95 per cent usage, not least because of the daytime conference trade) to finish the job off. The original, highly modeled acoustic timber panelling around the stage was showing all the signs of over-hasty reassembly on opening night, complete with scratches, fingermarks, and patches of dust. A few of the Rimex panels on the reflectors were badly jointed, showing signs of edge damage. Such details matter: when you are listening to music, your eye wanders around the auditorium much more than it does when focused on a theatre stage. You find yourself returning to the perceived defect over and over again. Taut skins of stainless steel are unforgiving: they have to be perfect. As for the timberwork, it looks like all it needs is a good going-over with beeswax.
Meanwhile, out in the lakeside café, AHMM have done a 1960s/early 1970s-style reworking of the interior, which reveals more of the original structure - and takes certain styling cues from the original design, such as the new oval light fittings - while adding evocative details of the time such as woodgrain laminate and hot colours such as orange and turquoise. Coming after their rescuing of the 1960s maintenance depot in Paddington - now the HQ of the Monsoon Fashion chain - this confirms them as true Sixties groupies. Meantime they are getting on with the job of finalizing their feasibility study for the other public areas - which will include putting a wide bridge across the foyers, from front to back, in just the place that Crosby perplexingly avoided.
The difference between the two architects’ approaches is that AHMM are happy to rework the style of the period - falling roughly midway in the centre’s construction - while Caruso St. John have produced work that is entirely new, clearly 21st century (the material did not even exist in this form until recently) but still wholly complementary to the original architecture, which they uncover wherever possible.
Taken both for what it is, and as a foretaste of things to come, the new work at the newly-listed Barbican is highly encouraging. A new generation has come to appreciate it, and to regard its failings with indulgence rather than irritation. People still get lost there, the wind can still howl round the open spaces - but suddenly, these things don’t seem to matter quite so much. The Barbican was described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as it was being built as “wild and wilful”. The latest of the Pevsner-originated “Buildings of England” volumes to cover the place, by Simon Bradley, adds that the aesthetic is of the Sublime - man-made Sublime. That sounds exactly right. We now need a 21st century Piranesi to record it.
