Today, the suburbs are becoming positively fashionable as a new generation of architects and theorists reacts against the dense-city formula now prescribed by Lord Rogers and others. In their day, the Barbican architects were reacting against the land-hungry suburban ethos of the 1950s, and the city-country pendulum has swung several times since then. But the Barbican is not theory. It exists, and it works. Unlike the neglected South Bank, it has been well maintained and steadily improved by its owners and funders, the City of London. It is a model.
Not a perfect model, of course. You do get lost there. Being built on many levels with many route choices, its layout militates against easy understanding. Sinking the arts centre deep into the ground so as to reduce its bulk gives the place a trogloditic quality, crossed with an interior décor that even its director, John Tusa, has likened to a former Eastern Bloc airport. But improvements are in hand, done by architects who respect the original architecture rather than fight against it.
The concert hall now looks and sounds a lot better, thanks to some subtle improvements by architects Caruso St. John, famous for the new Walsall Art Gallery. Their colleagues Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (coincidentally also Walsall veterans, having done the new bus station there) have refitted the centre’s waterside café and have big plans to sort out the confusing interior levels. Technically, the arts centre is now at the cutting edge, with a brand-new remote-control digital and analogue broadcast system, developed with the BBC, to capture live performances far more easily than was previously possible. Already, the resident London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davies is famed for the quality of its low-cost “LSO Live” recordings made there. And the Barbican area’s other cultural magnet, the Museum of London, now has its own ambitious expansion project by Stirling Prize winners Wilkinson Eyre.
The Barbican programming has become steadily livelier under arts director Graham Sheffield, with initiatives such as the annual “Bite” international theatre festival, the imminent “OnlyConnect” season of fusion music, an Australian film festival on the way, an exhibition of computer games from 1962 onwards, and the present well-received show of Martin Parr’s photographs of the disturbing everyday. Music of all kinds has long been a strength: the big question now is how best the organization can capitalize on the departure from May of its long-term resident, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and become a full-time receiving house instead.
Two things work in the Barbican’s favour. One is generational: people who were not born when it was built seem to have no problem with the place whatsoever - it’s just an interesting part of the city. The other is demographic. London’s centre of gravity has shifted eastwards. There is a much bigger population in surrounding Clerkenwell, Smithfield and Shoreditch than there used to be, and that population too is much younger. Restaurants and small cultural venues, from jazz clubs to art galleries, have sprung up like mushrooms all around the place, which has even been given a new name: Eastside. Going to the Barbican no longer feels like entering an oasis in a desert.
It is a fragment of a dream of what an ideal new city could be: cosmopolitan, smart, cultured, cared for. It has its flaws but the big idea succeeds and it is getting better, not worse. Time has treated it more kindly than a lot of later, flashier, architecture. This was a tomorrow that made it through to today with its ideals intact.
