I’ve just been off on a little sister holiday jaunt to England. While I spotted mid-century architecture everywhere I went … one place stood out as the most remarkable: the Barbican Estate.
Since visiting it, I’ve been tunneling down rabbit holes of architectural history, the differences in housing policy in both Britain and America in the post war era to today, how public housing has worked and hasn’t overtime and tying it all back to my forever-interest in mid-century homes.
I have a feeling that I’ll be writing and talking more soon about how tower blocks, public housing projects and housing policy connect back to the world we live in today. But for now, let’s have a fun tour of (a bunch of) really great buildings!!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Barbican Estate: what is it?
The Barbican Estate is a mixed use development from the late mid-century years covering 40 acres with 2000 odd apartments, flats, townhouses and terrace houses plus a concert hall, theater, cinema, arts center, a girls school, the Guildhall School of music and drama, a public library, plus (formerly) the Museum of London and a YMCA.
An estate – in this context – doesn’t mean a gracious home in the countryside, it it means a multi-family housing development. In connotation a british housing estate isn’t quite the same thing as an american housing project but there’s some crossover. Some were privately financed but most were and still are funded and administered by local government. (Council houses or Council estates).
Post war England had a dire housing shortage to deal with, just like we did in America. But they took a different path in addressing it. Instead of a big push toward private home ownership and federally insured mortgage structures, they leaned hard into public housing. And it often took the form of these cohesively developed sites with a combination of towers and blocks set into a green space and slightly cut off from the surrounding streets.
These were often infill development into areas where there had been major bombing damage during the war years. Sometimes it was just a one off like this modernist intervention into a street of older terrace houses.
In other cases it was a larger housing block in, presumably, a larger area of damage. For contrast, here are some snaps of a modernist housing estate built immediately after the war. It’s set into a slightly recessed parkland space below street level and each tower block has green space on the inside and (a bit of) parking toward the outside.
The Barbican Estate differs a bit from the traditional housing estate as it was never intended to be subsidized public housing. It WAS planned and built by the City of London but conceived as elevated housing for office workers without families and rented at market rates.
a home for “young professionals, likely to have a taste for mediterranean holidays, french food, and scandinavian design.”
It’s been and is occupied by cabinet ministers, Labor and Conservative party leaders and broadcasters. While some of the units are as small as one bedroom flats, others are penthouse apartments spanning the top floors of each tower and some are (secretly) houses.
There’s a set of little three story “mews terrace” style houses with roof gardens in one area.
Here what seems to be a balcony-free block of apartments are actually side by side terrace houses. We walked past the back (kitchen) doors on our tour along the pedway. The main doors are accessed at street level. Each vertical line of windows is one individual terrace house. Not all THAT dissimilar in function from the streets of terraced housing all over London.
And of course there are loads of apartments all over the complex. Basically anywhere there’s a long extended balcony there are double loaded apartments. They are accessed by a central corridor and elevator lobby and have a second means of egress available by running along the connecting balcony segments to a fire stair.
At one point there was a rule stating that red geraniums (and only red geraniums) must be grown in the balcony planters.
Let’s talk brutalism
The Barbican is often described as a brutalist, maybe the brutalist building, although the architects of the whole site, Chamberlain, Powell and Bond, apparently, really pushed back on that. They didn’t want their creation to be concieved of as so simple and utilitarian as pure brutalism.
If you’re not familiar with the term, in popular culture, it’s generally taken to mean a big, ugly concrete building.
In fact, brutalist was a term originally that came from the French Béton brut, and it just meant raw concrete.
The same way that brut in the wine world is a very dry type of white wine – raw wine – a brutalist building is often “raw” formed concrete. It shows it’s structure to the world. You can often see the plywood pattern of the formwork left in it’s surface. It’s simple. Theoretically cost effective.
In that way, at least, the Barbican is anything but brutalist. The whole site is filled with playful even silly details – like the tuning fork columns in the facade of the London Guildhall School of Music. And the concrete is neither raw nor cost effective.
The concrete in the Barbican
Pretty much the first stop on the official tour of the site is to go into a little side hatch where one can still view the material test patches that the architects used to determine the final finish. They considered cladding nearly all of it in small white marble tiles. They also did consider raw concrete.
But instead they landed on this hand (jack)hammered finish which required a crew of 20 construction workers nearly 20 years to complete. Everywhere there is textured concrete … this is how they made it happen!!
Getting lost at the barbican: the pedway system
One of the major complaints against the space is that it is HARD to navigate and … I can confirm. The very first thing I did on arriving at the site was get horribly lost and run 5 minutes late to the tour.
The ambitious system of elevated walkways (pedways) was part of a larger urban plan to separate people and cars in the City of London that … never really took off in any other area than here … where it literally cast in concrete.
This is really, one of the biggest mistakes Architects as a group can make. Assuming that our heroic design idea can and should take precedence over the experience, logic and preferences of the people who will actually use a space.
The downfall of any channelized walk way system is that it lacks critical redundancy. There’s only one – or just a few – way to get somewhere in a hurry and it’s likely the long way. Unlike a city grid where you can choose between multiple parallels paths, or a street where you can cross to the other side to avoid construction, chilly shade, or just someone you don’t want to talk to … the pedway system dictates how you’re going to get somewhere.
The lesson, I guess, is to try to listen to the people who will be using your spaces AND to design in flexibility, redundancy, options so that everyone can experience the space in their own way.
More on this in the accompanying podcast episode!
I made it there in the end though! And bought myself a novelty badge to prove it.
Quick design tip for turning a great vacation into home improvement ideas
Bring your vacation home with you …
… and I don’t mean photos. (Although trip photos are great).
When you’ve lived in your house for a while, it can be hard to think outside the box of what it IS to get at what it COULD BE. For example, if you have a small cramped kitchen, perhaps only one person in your household cooks … because only one person really fits. But if you HAD more space, you might like to use it to collaborate in the kitchen. Or … maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe there’s still only one person who loves to cook but it would be so nice to have more social time with that person. When you’re too stuck in your routines, it can be hard to visualize.
One of the easiest ways to get around that is to think about how you’ve lived differently when you’ve been in a different space.
Did you cook collaboratively at your last AirBnB?
Did you get out the door more quickly when everyone could see all their coats on the hooks by the hotel room door?
Did you feel better about every day when it started with the coffee you made, right in the bedroom, the last place you stayed?
Think about how you enjoyed those details of vacation life and then try to apply them to the house you live in every day. Why wait to really enjoy your life during the few weeks you’re on vacation when you can take it back home with you?
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
Bakelite Outlet and Switch Plates
Bakelite was one of the first plastic-like materials to be introduced into the modern world and was popular because it could be molded and then hardened into any shape.
Learn more about the Barbican
For some fun FAQ’s from the Barbican themselves check out: Everything you wanted to know about Barbican Architecture
This About Buildings and Cities podcast episode (number 4 Barbican Estate – Establishment Brutalism) is quite delightful .
And you can always…
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” available on demand!
- Join us for our FREE Curb Appeal Mini-Clinic on May 14th! RSVP so we can enter you to a win a great giveaway form Mid Mod Midwest or Modern House Numbers.
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Now, a few weeks ago, I found the Barbican center, and yes, I did get absolutely lost on the way, but that hasn’t stopped me from being absolutely obsessed ever since. If you’ve never heard of it, the Barbican is a housing estate in the City of London in England that some might argue represents the pinnacle of brutalism, of modernism, of housing estate design, and others might say is none of those things. More on that in a minute.
But today, I want to talk about the difference between British Post War development and American about what we can take home with us from our travels, and about heroism in modernist design, and how we can be heroic here and now. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. And also this week, enthusiast of British public housing projects. You’re listening to Episode 2105.
So before we get into it, don’t forget that next week, on Wednesday at noon central is the curb appeal clinic, and this 30 minute live class is going to be all about what you can do to make some tune up choices around your house, and also how to think about planning projects, a number of little one off projects that add up to something bigger, that don’t take you in A random direction, but take you in the direction of your bigger vision.
And this is going to be really fun and encouraging for anybody who is just looking for a way to get started on making some positive changes around their house. You want to be at this class. It’s going to be so fun if you don’t happen to be free next Wednesday at noon, central time, then sign up anyway. Go to mid mod dash midwest.com/mini-clinic
and we’ll send you the recording as soon as it’s done, so you can watch it on your own time. As I get into today’s episode of talking about a specific building or complex of buildings in London, England. What does that have to do with mid-century ranch style houses here in the Midwest, I’ll bring your attention to a couple of things. I’ve talked in the past about how to use the concept of vacation to inform your remodel plans.
And that can work in so many different ways. The first one is to think about the structure the process of planning remodel like you think about the process of planning a vacation. I talked about this Ooh, a couple years ago, episode 1209. Is what it was. Plan your remodel like your last perfect vacation. And the short, short version, although I recommend you go give that a listen, is that whenever I get asked, What’s a quote, kitchen remodel, unquote, going to cost? I laugh, and I think about the comparison of asking what a vacation would cost, it depends, but when you flip that around, you absolutely can think about how the different types of vacations you might like, or the type of vacation you enjoy is different than the generic, than white lotus, than the way your friends and family like to be away from home.
Are you a package resort person? a luxury wine tour person, a backpacking and camping person, do you like to mosey through a day in a faraway place? Or are you up at dawn checking adventures off a to do list, and Are you happier when you’ve prepped every single detail in advance? Or do you like to have room to find unexpected adventures along the way? All of those questions speak to your persona and your preferences, and it’s a great parallel, because travel and remodeling are both out of the ordinary experiences.
They’re both a little more expensive than your daily life, and both, if done right, are ultimately absolutely worth it. So I explicitly touched on that comparison in just the last episode, when I mentioned that the experience of my time in London ended up being more eat-out-ish than I’m used to, and made it unexpectedly pricier than I expected, and that that was just something I had to absorb along the way and not let it derail me as I went forward.
So you can absolutely use a metaphor of how you have coped with the planning process, with the stress, with the fun, with the return afterwards, the letdown post vacation, all of those things are great when you’re thinking about what it will feel like to take on a remodel, to plan for a remodel, to pay for a remodel, to experience the remodel process. But there’s also, let’s, morph into our design resource, our design tip of the week.
I’m also going to talk about the idea of vacationing, and this in the sense of take your vacation home with you in a very practical way, because sometimes it can be really hard to visualize how life inside your home can be different than it already is, and the experiences that we have when we are away from home, visiting friends, staying in an Airbnb or even a hotel, or just looking back on past places where we have lived and loved can be really helpful to get outside the bubble of what we have as a container for our lives right now, this is a concept that I teach inside of ready to remodel in the dream module that deals with the way.
You have felt during time away from home or during time you’ve spent in places in the past to help you inform what you want to prioritize in your home. Update today, and this comes up for me all the time with clients, with students. In fact, I just at our live layout Buster Challenge workshop for the ready to remodel students. I’m recording this on a Tuesday, on Monday night, one of the questions I was asking the couple as we worked through layout choices for their kitchen is, how do they cook in their kitchen right now?
But I know that they’ve been in their house a couple of years, and right now their kitchen is very small and confined. So even more so for a client I was talking to who’s been in their house for 10 years, in a very small, constricted kitchen, so many of their lifestyle habits, the way that they go about spending time in their kitchen, are informed by the micro space of that kitchen, and it’s hard to think outside the box. Would they cook together if they could?
Right now they almost cannot, so they don’t. So this is a really helpful way. If you have trouble visualizing a space that’s different from your home, or if you want to think about how you would live differently in a different situation, you can think back to how you lived when you spent time in different places. Because keeping a vacation alive is less about photos or souvenirs, and it’s not about sort of if you if you google how to bring your vacation home with you.
You’re going to get a lot of like how to make your house style, your house like a beach house in your kitchen, or what combination of hotel fluffy white towels will turn your bathroom into a hotel like day spa? But that is, I mean, that’s not wrong, but it’s a little more superficial than what I’m talking about. Let’s dig a little deeper. As an architect, I want to ask you about how did the places you stay on your trips make you feel what were the best parts of your time away from home?
And answering these questions seriously can help you prioritize your home update in ways that have the greatest impact on your psyche and your well-being, if, for example, you really enjoyed the smooth popping out the door routine you found in your hotel. That could mean that you need to really organize your mud room so that everything you need is ready to grab and go for you and the whole family as you leave the house.
It might mean that it’s having more of a place for everything, everything in its place, or it might mean that having things out in plain sight is more important than having them tucked away, especially for one of your other family members who has a hard time getting out the door because they forget things. If they’ve got everything hanging up in visual sight, like it was in the hotel on your last vacation, that might be a really helpful thing to identify and add to your plans. Or did you love the coffee ritual of sort of waking up in your Airbnb and getting straight to your first morning cup without having to tidy up or get dressed or do dishes or anything like that.
Maybe this means you want to prioritize making space for a coffee nook in your kitchen or even in your owner’s area in your bedroom area everything you need for your first cup of the day together in one spot so you can sleep, walk right to it and then have incredibly calm morning time with the first cup of coffee. Or when you spend time with your in laws. Do you just live on the back deck? Maybe it has the chair where you sit outside in the shade watching the pups or the tots play with a drink in your hand.
This could lead to you creating a more smooth indoor outdoor connection for your home, a deck that’s right outside of a sliding door on the same level, rather than having to go down a couple of steps into the yard that’s in sight from the kitchen, that just invites you to come right outside and have that same peaceful experience in your home that you enjoy when you’re away. So with your preplanning, you don’t have to wait to enjoy your life only for the week of the year that you are on vacation at your favorite summer house.
You can take those qualities with you, incorporate them into the remodeling your own home. And I’m not talking about just hanging a print of the ocean in your kitchen or a photo framed from your trip, although that can be fun. I’m talking about bringing home the design of the spaces, the flow of this space is so ask yourself questions like, Where did you stay that you enjoyed the most on your last trip, and what were the qualities of that space? What about it helped you relax or unplug? What was different from your own house?
Now, some of it might be as simple as adding a few products or organizational tool to your home exits or putting a coffee machine in your bedroom, but you might also find that there are things that need a larger update to make them happen, and this is part of the fun of leaning into that, that that’s your tip. Think about the what, the why of your vacation and why it was so great, not just how you were off work, although that certainly helps. But you know, how did you feel and how did the space you were in make you feel that way?
So with that in mind, I’m going to talk a little bit about my recent trip to England, and this I was going to talk about this last week, I’ve been meaning to post about this on Instagram, and I’ve been radio silent because I’ve just been absorbed. Corruption mode. Lately, there’s so much I want to learn, so much I want to contextualize about the differences between British and American Housing the history of the mid-century. I talked in the episode before I left, about how I’d been doing some research on mid-century typologies in England. But as I was there, I was just realizing there is so much more to the way the urban fabric is created, to the way that our ideas about social life and society informed buildings. And this is my favorite thing about architecture, the way that we create buildings that then turn around and create our lives. And it’s this ever slow moving cycle circle that sort of takes us through the process of creating, creating mid-century life. Creates the way that we think about our lives in our houses, the way that we respond to our cars, the way we respond to our neighborhoods, the way we respond to our neighbors, and the way that the fabric of urban life and mid-century urban life in England was different. Was just really fascinating to me to see. So I’m going to talk about, I’ve boiled this down for the purposes of getting it all into one episode. I’m going to talk about one specific place that I went, the Barbican, which is a housing estate in the City of London, and then also branch out to a whole bunch of other little pieces that I think may come back and be larger topics of conversation for me as I go forward, because I’ve been really fired up to think about the benefits of public housing, of social housing, how society believes in our need to be housed well, and how we as homeowners, as mid-century American homeowners,
can participate in advocacy, can think about how we live, how we want to live through our whole lifespans, and how we want to make space for other people to live around us. Before I go any further, I should say there are pictures to go with this episode. I think I took over 400 pictures of the Barbican and the Barbican center while I was there. I will not put 400 pictures into the blog post, because, honestly, it’s too much upload time, but I will put lots of pictures of what I’m talking about into the show notes page for this. S
o you’ll want to find that at mid mod midwest.com/ 2105 and yeah, I’ll mention that again at the end. So a couple of quick sort of overview framing things in general. One thing I immediately noticed was that our American approach to housing after the war was to spread people out in rings around the existing urban cores, in suburbs, in new cities, and with a big focus on making possible individual, single family home ownership, as I’ve talked about before, not for everyone.
We used this time to really entrench making homeownership more viable for white families, for entrance, for instance, which certainly didn’t create racism, but further entrenched racial disparities in economics and social divides and how people lived near each other and were used to each other and knew each other. So it had, it had a lot of problems, but it was an approach. It was about to help a family, a family specifically, we will put them into a house. We will make a house affordable to them. They will own that house.
And the British approach to getting people housed in the post war housing crunches was to supply publicly owned housing projects, or as they would call them in England, housing estates which gathered people more densely together, closer to population centers than they had ever been before, and those opposite choices, which ran on their own separate rails for at least 20 years, maybe more like 30 years after the war, have resulted in very different landscapes, very different economic patterns, different modes of transit, and I felt the effect of them constantly as I enjoyed popping around the south of England.
All of this should be caveated by saying I’m not an expert historian. I have a mag by like collection of little facts about history and culture in the built environment. So what I have gleaned from a lifetime of observing the world here in America, and my travels, and what I’ve just picked up in my most recent visit to England is not going to be complete, but this is how I see it now, and I’m going to continue to think about it. If you have thoughts about this, I’d love to hear them.
Send me an email, send me a DM on Instagram, and let’s, let’s talk about it. But in both cases, the combination of World War Two and the rising industrialization led to a movement of people coming out of agricultural lifestyles and into towns and cities in very distinct ways that have colored our culture ever since. So without going too deeply into them, I just want a signpost that some of the things I’ve been thinking about in the last couple of weeks have been American public housing projects and how they have largely been stigmatized and regarded as failures. Whether that seems fair, if you want to get into this ahead of me, I suggest googling Cabrini Green Pruitt Igoe, the history of American housing projects is a history of bad news reports and major demolitions on.
Um, and certainly there has been similar conversation around housing estates. That’s the British term for housing project, a mass planned group of dwellings, largely flats, sometimes big tower blocks that are all put together and planned and developed at the same time. But um, there was much. It was a much bigger push to get people into housing estates. At one point in England, I think as recently as the 1970s half of all British citizens lived in public housing. And while it’s never been anyone’s favorite, it’s always sort of like, if you could afford to live elsewhere, you probably would, but if you couldn’t, you didn’t need to, and it was just an option.
A lot of press, Inc, has been spilt against the sync estate, which I think sort of implies living on an estate that kind of goes downhill and becomes trashy or impoverished, and that it sort of the people in it are pulled down as well. But there was a time when there was a theory of public housing in England that really meant that people should be provided their homes, which is certainly never been a philosophy of the US. I think since the first, maybe not since the actual first peoples here, everyone who has come to the US has kind of got off the boat and had a sense of like, well, you’re on your own now, kid, hope you survive. Maybe you won’t.
And, and I don’t think that that’s been the sense at all times, particularly not right after World War Two in England. So more on all of these questions of public housing and social housing and what, what is earned or deserved. What do we owe each other as housing? I’m going to talk in specific about a particular building or collection of buildings, really, the Barbican in the City of London. And this is a big mixed use development, actually. It’s got the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It’s got the home of the London somebody, orchestra. It used to have the City Museum of London or Museum of London, although that has closed and is about to be rebuilt in another location. I wasn’t able to visit that.
But also housing for, I think, something around 2000 different housing units, flats, maisonettes and actual houses, always kind of intended for the class of people that were working in the financial district at the center of London. There is London, is a city in England, and there is also the City of London is the tiny core the original Old City, which is now almost entirely occupied by business buildings, high rise office towers, but also the Barbican. I have to shout out alert listener and Instagram friend of mine, Noel, who recommended that I go and take the tour, the two hour tour of the Barbican center.
Um, I had planned to go see it because it’s on every list of architecture to view in London and mid-century, or brutalist pieces or heroic architecture in general. I was just gonna go and wander around, but I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that there would be a formal tour. The formal tour was incredible, and I will talk about that later. But thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Noel for suggesting it the Barbican itself. Let’s, let’s do a quick overview. The term Barbican means the outer defense of a castle or a walled city. Specifically, it means a fortified gatehouse, or sometimes in England, places are named for what they’re just outside of.
So the Barbican district in Plymouth, for example, is the area just outside of the old fortified city, the sort of the last resort part of town and the Barbican estate in London is an area just outside of the old Roman city walls that had once been that it was a lot of different things, but had once been a sort of a garment district, a fabric district before the war, before World War Two, and in one single night of bombing, most of it burned down. So it was an area of complete rubble during and right after World War Two and almost immediately became a target of planning.
The idea was to put in an estate there. And when I say estate, you might picture something out of Bridgerton or Downton Abbey, but no housing estate in in British terms, means a large a dense residential planned unit. So they planned for this almost immediately after the war, but they didn’t actually get around to building it, due to a lot of paperwork and committees and what have you, for about two decades. So it is not so much a mid-century installation as it is a post mid-century installation. It was begun in the late 60s, finished, I think in the 70s, maybe in the 80s.
I was, I have to admit, I was taking more photos than notes on my tour. But it is a monument to the big thinking, the dreaming of the mid-century era. So. And I found it to be truly, truly lovely. Has a lot of crossover to mid-century modernism. This is often described as brutalist, maybe the brutalist building, although the architects of the original space, Chamberlain, Powell and Bond, apparently, really pushed back on that. They never wanted it to be fined as brutalist. If you’re not familiar with the term brutalist, it’s generally taken to mean a big, ugly concrete building today in in sort of popular terms.
In fact, brutalist was a term originally that came from the French term Béton brut, and it just meant raw concrete, just like brute wine is a very dry type of white wine, raw wine, a brutalist building is often formed concrete. You can sometimes see, like the plywood pattern of the formwork on it. It’s meant to not be overly ornamented, very practical, sort of showing its systems, showing its structure. And so the Barbican itself is not that it has a lot of decorative detail. It has a lot of playfulness. I would actually argue that a lot of the brutalist buildings that people revile today also have quite a lot of playfulness around their structure.
In Madison, the sort of two most notable brutalist buildings are the humanities building and the Vilas communications center down on campus, and they are very hated. I actually love them. They’re not the most practical buildings for what that they are. For example, the humanities building has the school of music and the arts classes in it, and it’s always trouble with temperature controls and so having to go outside to get from one place to another in the winter, not the best.
But this is a bit of a digression. I personally love them, and I would be slash will be very sorry to see them go the Barbican has a lot of concrete. An architect is basically contractually obligated to love materials in their raw form, a wall of exposed two by four, simple, untreated wood, anything plain brick, concrete. And this is a lot of crossover to mid-century modernism of just loving materials for their simplest form. To the general public, a lot of exposed concrete can seem pretty harsh, so people were generally quick to take the term brutalist to mean a harsh, ugly, brutal but I’ll start right off the bat by saying that while there is a lot of concrete on view in the Barbican, it struck me as less brutal and more monumental, craggy even carven, and there was a lot of playful pieces.
The whole estate, The whole design is filled with clever, sometimes even smart-alecky details, like long, vertical, RUNZ aligned windows that have a play on the concept of the Palladian window. A Palladian window in neoclassical architecture is a three part window where the center of the three windows has a half circle arch at the top, and there are a lot of there’s a section of townhouse areas, vertical stacked units that all are one part of one house, side by side by side in the Barbican that sort of referenced the townhouse design that happens all over London, where they have an upside down half circle at the bottom of a long run of vertical windows, a flipped polynian window.
There are also details there. The London School for Girls is there, and the details on the outside of that building look like pencils. The London Guild Hall School of Music is on that site, and it has a detail of tuning forks, one for every note of the octave. Around the outside. There’s a lot of that sort of thing. And the best thing about the whole estate is how varied it is. When you walk into it, you see tower blocks. You see sort of sixth floor housing units. There are smaller pieces. It’s all arranged around a couple of big courtyards with water features and playing fields in the middle. Feels very cloistered. And there are so many different floor plans, I think over 80, that there are different scales.
Now you don’t actually see how that works from the outside. You can’t see how the spaces are divided up, but you can see the variety even in the heights and the shapes and the massing of the buildings. And there’s even a little component that reads like a muse terrace, which is a London housing typology that’s adapted from in the big, fancy townhouses of horse and cart days, there was always a back alley with carriage houses lining it so that the grand houses could have their horse and carts put away on site and at ready call.
And so now that people don’t keep horses and carriages in their city houses, all of those back Carriage House alleys have been converted into little apartments that are on a quiet, one lane street tucked between the blocks a muse terrace. And so there’s a little Muse area built into the Barbican as well, not as a vintage relic, but as a sort of a playful nod. And all of the elements as you go, I want to absolutely Google the Barbican if you’re out and about, go to the show notes page, mid mod, midwest.com/ 2105 to check out some of the photos.
The edges of the towers each have a sort of an upturned balcony, and that curving balcony does a bunch of different things. It’s a visual motif that the architects called a gondola design. I’m not I can see it, but that’s maybe not what I would go but they do make a really delicate, repetitive structure that gives you some nice privacy on the inside of the units, and also hides the structural bracing frame of the whole space, so that the towers are basically just sitting on columns, and what keeps them from racking or twisting in the wind is the mass of concrete in those upturned balcony edges.
Many of the tower blocks, if there have smaller units, have a second means of egress. The way you get out in a fire is along all of the balconies, which are all connected along the outside, and there are little glass wing walls that separate them for privacy. But as we heard from the tour guide, by the way, the tour guide, I kid you not, was named Oliver pickle. I have never met a more British sounding person in my life, but he was explaining that he’d had a friend who’d lived in one of those apartments at one point and had left a bag of sort of compost, organic garden waste out on the balcony for three days and then got a letter in the mail saying, You’re blocking the fire escape. Please move out.
There has been in the past a lot of regimentation. I noticed there’s a beautiful number of the balconies have plantings on them. And in fact, Residents are encouraged, maybe even required, to have plantings, to sort of have greenery, to break up the mass of concrete. And at one point, I believe the rule was, maybe just in one block of flats, that they had to be red geraniums. Now there’s more flexibility, but, but as it as you go, and please do please go look at the pictures of this place. But as you think about a big concrete space in its original design, in the earlier part of the mid-century era, when it was being planned, there was a desire to make it all out of marble tile. So it might have been much more the White City on not a hill.
And as it is, the majority of the exposed concrete is not raw or brute, but incredibly hand sculpted, because all of the visible concrete edges has a texture you don’t necessarily notice it at first, but when you think about it, you’re like, Well, what creates that? It’s not a form mold. And actually, they poured it all a little bit thicker than it needed to be, and then a team of about 20 men spent 20 years jack hammering a texture back into it to give it that more complicated, craggy texture, which is absolutely reminiscent of some of the dressed limestone details that I consistently saw on neoclassical buildings all over Britain.
And then I’m sure that the architects had studied in their travels, the layout of the Barbican. It has these tower blocks, big, tall towers in a couple of places, more like six to 10 story block units in a couple of other places. It’s all set up around a couple of courtyards with, as I say, the orchestra Hall, the theater, a cinema and a museum and an art center, all sort of in a central area. But it is, it is a maze to get into, because it was also built around, maybe more of an optimistic than practical idea from the mid-century, years of because it was built near or in the center of London, the City of London, there was this concept that it would be convenient to get people out of the way of all the cars that were starting to come into the city.
And this is a little bit of the Oh, architects had a big idea, or planners had a big idea, and it didn’t work out so well. They had created a Pedway, a system of second story that, in England, means third story, walkways that were elevated that sort of take you around the site. And my own experience of getting in was to choose at random the absolute wrong direction turn right instead of left as I hit the outer sort of mass wall of the complex.
And with 10 minutes to spare on my tour to go halfway around the outside, get into it, and then have to go almost all the way around on the second floor walkway system, getting more and more and more anxious about being late for my tour time, and it did feel a little a little hostile, a little defensive wall, a little maze like but I don’t know if I hadn’t been running late, I would have really enjoyed the experience. It reminded me strongly of a similar system in Minneapolis St Paul, which exists and makes sense, because in that area, they’ve built a system of walkways, both second floor and basement, which exist to keep people out of the weather in the winter.
So entering the Barbican for the very first time, I could tell. Oh, oh no. There’s no way to get down and across this. I need to stick to this walkway. I could tell it was directing me somewhere. I just hoped it was directing me to the right place. There wasn’t a lot of signage. I couldn’t really see where I was going or it was going to take me, but I just had to trust the process.
So this, this really was, it was fun to hear about this on the tour, and I’ve been reading about it since a remnant of an idea that the City of London Founding Fathers, or managing fathers, had. And City of London itself, like I said, it’s a financial district. It’s not very thoroughly occupied. The management of is a little bit like a Vatican city, a city inside of a city run through a complicated system of in theory, everyone that works in the city gets a vote, but in practice, their votes are managed by their employers.
So there’s this sort of cabal of business interests that run it. And they had this concept. I the modernist era is filled with ideas that worked and ideas that did not work. So one of the ideas that did not work was they had this notion that they could create a perfect car city for all the managers to speed through with no risk of hitting a person. If they moved all the people up to a second floor level on these pedways, they were to be built all the way through the city of London and out over the river.
And basically, none of them were ever built, or if they were, they were knocked down almost immediately, except in the Barbican center itself, because people don’t like it. Total sidebar, but having been a college student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where I had to just dress in a warm coat to get from building to building, and a student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, I got to see a difference in the way that affected our two campuses in the life which was as a grad student at the University of Minnesota, they had a system of tunnels and second floor walkways all over campus.
Part of my experience was different in that being a grad student, I had a very distinct home in the School of Architecture, I would walk directly to my desk every morning, put my things down under it, leave my coat hanging on the back of my studio chair, go around to the rest of my classes, largely in the architecture building, but if I needed to get to another class, I took Dutch language classes all throughout grad school for a change of pace, or if I wanted to get half a mile away to the Student Union to buy food or visit the Weisman Art Museum, if the weather was uncertain, even just raining, certainly if it was winter, I would not go outside to get around campus.
I would go up to the second floor and walk out through a tube across the street or sometimes have to immediately dodge down below street level to a basement for an underground tunnel, but you could get absolutely everywhere on campus without crossing streets, crossing between buildings in an enclosed system. Was this system loved? No, it was not. But was it the most direct way to get from one building to another? It also was not.
It felt very stuffy and sometimes awkward, but I had definitely used it because the weather made me the express purpose of the Barbican was to be residences for people who lived and worked in the city to be near where they worked. So they were meant to be connected into the city. And I think that system of walkways might have worked had it been fully realized. But as was pointed out in an excellent podcast I listened to about the Barbican Center, which I will let me go cite that right now. This was the buildings and cities, the about buildings and cities.
Podcast Episode Four, going back a long way, hosted by Luke Jones and George Gingell, gringo gingle, the Barbican estate establishment, brutalism, they were pointing out that part of the problem with that concept with the walkways is a lack of redundancy, and that being forced there’s only one way to get around is very limiting. When you’re in a park, you can take multiple cuts across the grass. If you’re walking on a sidewalk and you run into an obstacle or a dog or a person you don’t want to meet, you just cross to the other side of the street.
But if you’re following a concrete designed highway in the sky, created by an architect with a vision of ideal processional routes, there is no shortcut and there’s no way to hurry when you’re late, or to get out of the rain when it’s pouring, or to avoid a neighbor you don’t want to see. So this is a little bit the problem of dreaming too big in architecture swinging a little bit too high. Still, I think this mega structure masquerading as a landscape is so fascinating, because it really does. It works remarkably well. It has public spaces and private spaces. People stay in it. People live in their apartments for a long time.
They recently had an internal vote whether they should add more security cameras, more CCTV around the space to make people feel safer, and they voted that they didn’t need more security measures because they don’t have a problem with a notable problem with crime there. So I think that the Barbican is both an interesting object in itself and such a representative of this moment in time when people had a really. Public view of what design could do, of how to solve problems.
Another thing that got pointed out on that same podcast was the trouble with architects, which is true, which is that they we tend to think inside the scope of our project, rather than beyond it, inside the brief. So that often means we just think about what’s happening inside a building and not how it responds to a city. And a city, of course, is not made of buildings. It’s the space between the buildings. A neighborhood is the space on the street, on the sidewalks, that’s created by the gaps between buildings. It’s very easy for architects to forget about the cities and the neighborhoods that we are constructing out of individual buildings and the horrible spaces for most people to live in.
So what’s fascinating about the Barbican is that it is a design brief that’s big enough that the designers were required to create public spaces as well as interior ones, and there’s debate over whether it was successful. Certainly it is hard to get into. I can attest to that. I did buy a pin. They make a pin and sell it in their gift shop called I found the Barbican center, and the graphic on it is a maze, and it’s appropriate. I bought the pin because I did find the Barbican center after some strenuous working. But I don’t know that. I would say that it’s unique.
I think just like the buildings feel like they’re referencing the texture of decorated limestone or the Flipped palladium window, I felt like the design of the Barbican felt very reminiscent of other public spaces or private semipublic spaces in London, there’s a quality of a British or at least a London Park, that I noticed, which is that they never flow directly off a sidewalk. In America, if you had a city block that was a park, the odds are that there would be the road, the driving lane, the parking lane, a little bit of grass, a sidewalk, and then grass turning into Park.
But in a British or a London Park, there’s always a paling, a great gate, a fence line between the sidewalk and the park itself. And often that they’re gated so they can be closed off at night, and the gate, the fence, is often also hedged so it’s open to the public. When you when you can go inside it, you feel like you’re in this magical, really, away from the city oasis. You’ve gotten away. You’re in a green space that’s taken far from the urban landscape. It’s precious, but it is separated from the thoroughfares. You never just naturally flow into it.
And there’s also absolutely a tradition of private parks. So in a Georgian terrace square. There’s often a little bit of green space in the center between two roads, but it’s not a public park. It’s a fenced in park that’s only for the people who live in that space, and that a little bit is what the Barbican felt like to me. I actually don’t know if all the public the accessible space inside is technically, is it sidewalk? Is it public space, or is it like the courtyard, ground floor area in a corporate building in an American city, where, technically, you can wander around during opening hours, but you might find that you’re subject to different rules or regulations, different sort of a concept.
I don’t know, but I did marvel at how beautiful, how quiet, how cloistered and sort of collegiate it felt, and the Barbican is also it’s a monument. It has apparently compared to nearly every housing estate in Britain, every brutalist building anywhere. It has never been threatened with demolition. It’s regarded as sort of inevitable. A lot of people love to hate on it, but it is a presence, and that’s so exciting.
So I think to me, it was fascinating to see this, this big heroic gesture. I’m gonna hark again back to that great podcast episode, Barbican estate establishment, realism. And one of the other things they said about it sort of flipply that it has no revolutionary potential. It’s simply historical. And they identify that there have been sort of two great heroic ages of architecture in London, the 1840s industrialization era, which was knocking down big swaths of the city to put in housing blocks, to put in railroads, to run new roads through.
And then in the 1940s after the war, making big moves forward to put people into houses and to rebuild the city after it was damaged in the Blitz, and they were lamenting that maybe it’s going to be another 20 years for another Heroic Age of architecture in London. I don’t know. 24 years doesn’t actually seem that far away to me at this point. And obviously we’re not in the context of mid mod remodel this podcast. We’re not necessarily, necessarily thinking about London’s great, historic, heroic ages of rebuilding. But I think to tie this back to why am I talking about this today? Why. The Barbican.
Why is modernism in Britain relevant to the mid modern model podcast? I do think this concept of heroism in architecture truly powerful big moves, if we think of heroism as big moves, rather than necessarily good or great moves.
Certainly the building boom of the mid-century age in America, the houses that we all live in and love, that I talk about on this podcast every week are a heroic transformation, a catastrophic transformation, a huge, monumental shift in the physical landscape of the United States and also the political and economic landscape of the United States.
This move towards more universal homeownership also became a division between who could and couldn’t become a homeowner, and like I said at the top, didn’t create racism, but certainly entrenched more generations of racist financial divisions in this country made a big shift towards certain types of economic groups being prioritized, pushed towards the male led nuclear family, and then, in some ways, led to the necessity of the dual income household, which was required in order to get onto that ladder of home ownership.
And the ladder of home ownership again, sort of, I’ve just been steeping myself in this concept of public housing. What does it mean to not need to own your own home? The ladder of home ownership is really feeling like Jack’s beanstalk into the sky. And if I think about the musical into the woods, Jack comes back down, thinking about how there are giants in the sky, big, tall, terrible giants in the sky, and how wondrous he finds that, but also how terrifying and scary it is so really, to think about what is this ladder of ownership that we’ve built in this country, how you get onto it, how it never feels very logical to get off of it. I’d say that, if I had to wrap this up with a conclusion, it ties back to our mid-century homes that we love here.
I think that what I love about a mid-century house in America, when I wanted to work in residential architecture, I didn’t want to build new homes for people, new, custom built high end all the bells and whistles, luxurious homes being built with every possible modification attached in new greenfield development and going out in the furthest extent of the suburbs, starting from scratch.
I didn’t want any part of that, and I also didn’t really want to be part of the high end residential remodeling cottage industry, which lends itself, again, to so much, scraping out everything and starting fresh to prove that the designer has done something, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of too muchness. But the grounding of the mid-century typology that house, the modest Levitt cottage, the generously small, open plan ranch house, the details that are built into them where they are located, this is what it’s all about, and its sort of the least bad version of American single family ownership ethos. It’s the closest to the center, the most walkable version of things.
It’s a movement of enough-ness that I think we can focus on because I’ve got to tell you, coming back from England, the first thing I noticed driving through my own neighborhood was the astonishingly large plots of land that even my relatively modest little mid-century neighborhood is built upon. And I think our mid-century neighborhoods have the potential to be even better than they are, with the potential to add in some density, and that density doesn’t have to look like a stack of containers, shipping containers with balconies or a bunch of gross faux modern cottages that are wildly outsized.
I think we can. We can look for ways to bring in more housing opportunities, more granny flats, more backyard development, more density on the edges to create more variety in our urban spaces. And that was really one of the things that I took away the most from walking around London, viewing housing estates in general, and from the Barbican in particular. The diversity of size and scale is so powerful and so playful and fun and enriching.
So if you’re curious about this massive, monumental brutalist housing estate in London, go check out the show notes page. I’ll link to some other podcasts, some photos, some references. You can also see it in movies. In the Quantum of Solace. It’s mi six headquarters. It shows up in and/or as the fictional city world of Coruscant, which makes perfect sense. It’s in slow horses. It’s in the 20 the last year’s season of the agency Michael Fassbender’s character lives in the space.
I can see why it’s so cinematic and photogenic and it’s just it’s really interesting. But also, I think what I want you to take away from this episode, more than anything else, is that different modalities of living are so useful when we think about how we like our lives, how we want to live differently, how we want to modify our routine. Means how we want to advocate for different space in our cities and our municipalities, and, yeah, and at the end of the day, you know, what can what do you take home with you from a trip? What does it open up your mind to?
So for me, I’m always going to be thinking about architecture. And when I travel, I think about architecture in other places, and when I come home, it makes me think about the architecture of my home space, as well as in comparison to the places I’ve visited. I hope you feel the same.
And with that, let’s shift into our mid-century house feature of the week, which will be, oh, let’s pick an odd one. How about Bakelite outlet covers? I picked all the mid mod features last year, and I picked this one because I have them in my mid-century house, and they honestly feel like such a 1940s relic slipping into the 50s. They have this almost Art Deco design to them, with the with the taupe color that they often have, but also with a slightly raised center, the sort of vertical line work. I’ll put some pictures of these into the show notes page, but I’m curious, do you have extant Bakelite outlet covers in your house?
If so, did you keep them? Did you immediately switch them out? In some cases, it can be challenged because they don’t necessarily fit. If you’re switching from two prong to grounded outlets, or if you’re upgrading your switches that you might instantly require a change, they also take paint, which has caused a lot of people to paint right over them. And I must say, I actually I painted over some back of light covers in my house, some of the early changes I made to my home that I now kind of regret.
I have been told by the internet that if you have painted back light outlet covers, you can lightly boil them to get the paint to loosen and come off, sort of all in one piece, and leave them back in in good shape again, to put on. So if you were trying to limit maybe in one particular room, in a place where you’ve got your most original features. If you want to get back to back a light, you can probably do that. You can probably also source it from Etsy, or from, if you’re lucky, your local restore.
I certainly dropped off some collection of mine when I removed them and modernized to rocker switch plates. So I’m curious about this. Is this even a thing that you’ve ever noticed? Is this a detail that pleases you? Is this something you had in your house that you’ve kept or that you instantly got rid of? I am curious, but the modern plastic outlet cover not my favorite.
I will say, if you want a zazzy upgrade for your outlets, then I highly recommend you check out the work of my friends over at atomic surplus LLC. They have an Etsy shop, atomic surplus, and they make wild shapes, fun trapezoids, fun colors, powder coated, all sorts of options in switchblade covers and really retro designs that are playful and cheerful and are great upgrade option if you’ve lost your original switch plates and you’re dealing with something sort of boring and home of depot standard.
If you don’t have your original backlight switchblade covers, go check out atomic surplus. They are lovely folks who make a lovely product. And with that, I think we’re about to all wrap up.
Don’t forget to go sign yourself up for the mid mod curb appeal clinic that I’m hosting in collaboration with my also friends over at modern house numbers, that’ll be next Wednesday, six days from today, at noon central. It’s a free workshop, but you do need to enroll so that we can send you the Zoom link and that so that we can send you an email afterwards with the replay link.
So go to midmod-midwest.com/miniclinic to get that access and then shoot me an email to let me know that you have or just to tell me about your favorite experience with a brutalist building, or the way you’ve traveled home with you over the decades.
I would love to hear about what has inspired you to make changes to your house, or what your favorite other architectural styles are as you have traveled around and taking things in, see you next week you.