the barbican took 23 years to complete and was one of the last hurrahs of the modernists tectural boldness fails in some fundamental ways. The edges of the Barbican Estate, and its entrance thresholds, are still as forbidding to pedestrians as 13th century crusader castles would have been to, say, Muslims in Jordan. There are no obvious connections between the Barbican and the urban grain around it: its main street entrance requires a ninemetre high orange arrow to attract attention. And the apartments’ original internal fittings are less than impressive – the doors, for example, are rather flimsy. But, in essence, this extraordinary tableau of buildings was never about the half measures or grim design bling that has made many supposedly innovative 21st-century buildings and urban developments utterly banal. We might even offer the Barbican up as a test of Marx and Engels scathing critique of namby-pamby ‘utopian socialists,’ in their Communist manifesto of 1848: “They still dream of an experimental realisation of their social utopia . . . pocket editions of the new Jerusalem — and to erect all these castles in the air, they must appeal to the philanthropy of the bourgeois heart and purse . . . They want to reach their goal by peaceful means and seek, through the power of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel through small-scale experiments, which naturally fail.” The Barbican is not small scale, and it is not utopian. It thrives as Britain’s largest self-contained mi xed-use estate, and is protected by Grade II 120 the urban issue / the barbican
heritage status. But it’s the range of its content, rather than its size, that sets the Barbican apart: 2,113 f lats housing about 6,000 residents, two schools, a hostel and church, gardens, an L-shaped lake, the Guildhall School of Music, and a major multiauditorium arts venue, the Barbican Centre. The towers, which are more than 40 storeys, contain apartments
designed to offer more than 100 different interior plans. The Barbican Estate took 23 years to complete and it remains one of the last great hurrahs of an age when Modernist architects – in this case the Chamberlin Powell and Bon practice – could propose big, genuinely risky ideas, and see them through. For example, when the Barbican Centre por-