The making of an arts centre

Gavin Stamp

y first visit to the Barbican Arts Cen-

tre shortly after one of its openings in March irresistibly recalled a science-fiction novel of my schooldays called Level Seven. This imagined the final extinction of human life after World War Three, in a nuclear shelter which went down and down through hermetic, artificial worlds to the seventh and last level — to which, of course, the radiation eventually filtered: In the Barbican there are also not floors but levels, although Level 9 is at the top. Whether the Pit theatre on Level 1 at the bottom offers any protection against fall-out I do not know, but there is the same feeling of an underground, technological world, cut off bounded reality, in the Arts Centre: a world °minded by concrete walls and harsh lights, and always with the faint hum of machinery in the background. It is all too easy to make fun of the Bar- bican. Everyone gets lost, despite the profu- sion of signs and symbols, and the resemblance of the foyers to a modern air- Port which many critics have noticed is Powerfully reinforced by the presence of a British Airways desk, at which one feels tempted to check in luggage so as to get back to the West End. But this is too easy, even easier than being over-impressed by the sheer astronomical cost of the whole l_thing (more than £150 million). The Bar- oican — both the Arts Centre and the whole development — presents the critic with a considerable problem, as he is confronted by what is not so much a modern building as an historical phenomenon: an old design Only lately completed. The Barbican is a magnificent realisation of a series of con- cepts which all now seem very out of date: comprehensive redevelopment, high-rise housing and the desirability of a 'cultural cciroPlexi.

, The real origins of the Barbican lie in the Ideas and designs of Le Corbusier, who had been preparing ideal schemes for com- prehensive urban redevelopment since the „920s. For the architects of the Barbican: Chamberlin, Powell and Bon — as for all

aspiring young architects after the war Le Corbusier was an inspiration and a pro- Met.

In 1952 Geoffrey Powell, won the com- petition for the housing development built by the City of London in Golden Lane, just north of the Barbican site. Powell having 4ccluired partners and having secured the confidence of the City Corporation, the

firm was asked to consider a residential development on the area east of Aldersgate Street, which had once housed a dense mix- ture of small businesses and warehouses and which had been particularly badly blitzed.

The Barbican was nothing if not com- prehensive. No less than 33 acres of ancient street pattern were obliterated and the new buildings are disposed about a 90-degree grid determined by the line of the re-aligned Underground railway in a concrete tunnel between Moorgate and Barbican (Alders- gate Station, as was). Designing around the irregular curve of the old railway was unthinkable to these radical architects. From the past, only the battered mediaeval church of St Giles's, Cripplegate, was allowed to survive: standing isolated and unreal like an Ancient Monument in an Osbert Lancaster fantasy drawing.

Complete separation of pedestrians from road traffic was envisaged from the begin- ning. 'Barbican' was an old street which took its name from the remains of a watch tower on the surviving City walls. I do not know if the architects pursued this castle analogy, but for the pedestrian the Bar- bican seems fortified. The motorist enters through hideous tunnels; the pedestrian does not know how to enter or which level to pursue.

A third scheme was submitted in 1959, work on the residential blocks and towers began in 1963 and was largely complete in 1974, by when the Arts Centre had been building for three years and was already way over budget and running late. An arts centre was planned from the beginning to be shared by the schools to be rebuilt on the site. In 1964 it was decided that both theatre and concert hall must be much larger than proposed if they were to be financially viable. The architects presented their scheme for the Arts Centre in 1969. This, with some modifications, is what has now at last been finished.

Whether or not London needs another theatre or concert hall, whether the RSC should ever have left their excellent Edwar- dian theatre in the Aldwych, whether an arts centre can survive so divorced from shops and other supporting urban ac- tivities, what has been built is extraordinary and an immensely impressive technical achievement. Most of the 11 million cubic feet of the Arts Centre are underground and the engineers, Ove Arup and Partners, and the contractor, John Laing, had to ex- cavate a huge hole without affecting the surrounding buildings. Into this has been fitted a concert hall seating 2,000, a theatre for 1,250, a smaller theatre, cinemas, a library, an art gallery, a conference centre, a conservatory, a large foyer, restaurants and the Guildhall School. The architects have with great skill fitted these spaces together like a three-dimensional jigsaw around the service roads and the railway tunnel. The concert hall and theatre are both comfortable and efficient, with good acoustics and sight-lines.

And there, perhaps, admiration may legitimately end. Architecture is more than the creation of spaces and the organisation of services. The claustrophobia and confu- sion which such tight planning produces is not alleviated by the architectural treatment of surfaces, nor by the detailing. As at the National Theatre, the internal walls are left as concrete except where they have been relieved — against the wishes of the archi- tects — by wall panels painted in garish col- ours, which are no doubt intended to be cheerful. Aesthetically, the concert hall shows remarkably little departure from the style of the Festival Hall (no bad thing, perhaps).

As at the National Theatre, the ceilings of the auditoria are a clutter of spotlights and equipment while the lighting in the foyers comes entirely from downlighters in the recessed concrete panels of the ceilings, casting pools of intense light between areas of gloom. But whereas the internal spaces in the National Theatre have a clarity which comes from an overall spaciousness and from a monumental development of simple geometry, the foyers in the Barbican are muddled and oppressive. The overall orien- tation and the relationship between spaces is not easily perceived, hence the necessity for a barrage of notices and symbols. The visitor on foot enters at Level 5 and the ugly numerals are, unfortunately, necessary if one is to find one's way back to a particular level. Other information is conveyed by those graphic symbols beloved by designers but which just confuse the literate and in- telligent.

This reliance upon notices and signs is, I believe, a confession of failure by modern architects, for explicit directions are only necessary when the very form of a building fails to convey function and direction. It is commonplace that so many modem build- ings have no obvious entrance. Architects have chosen to abandon the traditional architectural vocabulary, comprehensible through experience, by which builders of the past effortlessly indicated not only the main entrance but also a hierarchy of im- portance in internal openings, and the distinction between public and private spaces. The staircases in the Barbican foyers are impressive and dramatic, but so are they in traditional theatres. A useful comparison may be made with the Paris Opera, where complicated separate circula- tion systems, balconies and staircases are integrated in a glittering visual unity, in which a sense of occasion is given by the sumptuous use of materials and decoration. But, as at the National Theatre, the pos- sibilities presented by wood, marble, plas- ter, gold leaf and paint are deliberately, dogmatically rejected. Instead, the Bar- bican exemplifies that highbrow, joyless, puritanical aesthetic which has determined the design of British public buildings since 1945.

One reason why the Arts Centre is con- fusing is that it has only one prominent ex- ternal facade: a series of rectilinear `duct piers' separated by glazing — a strong but arid composition. But the Barbican was not designed in terms of facades; as the ar- chitects wrote in their 1968 Report, `The major facade of the whole Arts Centre Complex is, in a sense, its "roofscape" And, from this angle — only really to be enjoyed by the birds and the more elevated Barbican residents — the architecture of strong shapes really is quite marvellous.

A climb among the upper levels of the Arts Centre again suggests a 'castle' im- agery and recalled to me another book of my schooldays: Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. Steerpike climbs up to the fantastic roofs of Gormenghast, where he discovers secret worlds and looks down on remote ac- tivity far below. Up above the concert hall is a vast flat roof making a horseshoe- shaped court (a `Sculpture Court'), and the art gallery. Beyond is a vast, inexplicable conservatory wrapped around the tall fly- tower of the theatre, then there are ar- bitrary staircases and galleries and, unex- pectedly, the top of the library of the Guildhall School, rising up like a sub- marine. Although a less pleasant discovery is the restaurant, decorated in strident magenta by Mr David Hicks, an air of mystery is enhanced by looking down on to walkways and terraces below. But whereas the roofs of Gormenghast echoed with the cawing of rooks, up on top of the Barbican there is only the hum of machinery and the roar of hot foul air emerging through the vents.

The Barbican is the perfect architectural symbol of the arrogance and vain preten- sions of the 20th century: a machine for liv- ing in and a machine for culture. It represents complete dismissal of a muddled past and expresses the belief that technology and planning can control human life for the better. But technology can fail and planning can become total- itarian. Planned environments are no more perfect than ideal human societies. There are flaws, but whereas the oddities which occur in places which grow and change over the years can have an attractive charm, mistakes in large modern conceptions are brutal and unforgivable. Architects in the past never took on buildings of such a scale. The Barbican is a product of that naive bumptiousness which assumed that whatever was bigger was better. Now, I think, we know better.

However, if the Barbican is a failure — and maintenance and running costs may make it so — then it is one on an heroic scale. A visitor to the Arts Centre may flee from its hot, claustrophobic atmosphere, but in the secluded open spaces and pools between the blocks, where the combination of water, grass, trees and patterns owes more to English traditions than Le Cor- busier, there is real magic and grandeur. The Barbican maintains that rare and often unpopular strain in English architecture which is an interest in geometry and the monumental, a strain represented by Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, by Elmes and Lutyens. The housing blocks and towers are, from the outside, simply the best built in Britain since 1945. The earlier work of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in Golden Lane, like most British work in the 1950s, copies the pre-war designs of Corbusier but by the early 1960s Peter Chamberlin, in Par- ticular, was responding to the heavier, more Expressionist late work of the Swiss guru. As at the La Tourette Convent of 1957-60, there is an emphasis on the weight of con- crete, on pure geometry and on a monumental scale in the Barbican.

Concrete may be unpleasant indoors, but externally the pick-hammered dark Pen Lee crushed granite aggregate has a strong tex- ture. Of this material are the three 40-storey towers, with dramatically cantilevered balconies, which manage to be sculptural by having a ground plan with one acutely pointed corner and a carefully modelled top. The long, lower blocks are strong and dignified in their proportions and have a skyline of arched penthouse flats. Below are the massive podiums, perhaps the most attractive feature of the whole Barbican design: massive, Romantic walls of purple brick broken by arched openings, rising above water. The courses of brickwork manage to achieve the monumental, grandeur of Piranesi, or of the Victorian railway builders. Here is a confident ar- chitecture enhanced by the subtle drama °f pools and fountains, an architecture which in its extravagant irrelevance to everyday life really does recall Vanburgh. Fortunately, ordinary people are, for once, not compelled to live in a modern ar- chitect's grandiose conception, Tenants live here by choice, are protected by answer' phones at the foot of the staircases, and are mostly away at weekends — when the Bar; bican is empty and silent. Those ageing and bitter partisans of the Modem Movement often tell us that the failings of most post- war comprehensive modern developments were owing to reduced budgets, official philistinism and public incomprehension. This cannot be said of the Barbican: the buildings may be arrogant and have func- tional failings, but they have been built well, as designed, by a client who has stuck loyally with the project despite great dif- ficulties and rising costs. This is not to be lightly dismissed. As a result the Barbican Is, the one uncompromised realisation 0' Modern Movement principles and the fines! British monument to its totalitarian ideals. I hope it is also the last.