Building the Barbican: Glass reviews Building the Brutal

AFTER three decades of conception and planning, the Barbican finally opened in 1982. Designed by young architects Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, the Centre was imagined as a union of utopian inner city life, uniting culture, art and living through auditoriums, gallery spaces, residential flats and public spaces, raised gardens, cinemas and a glasshouse conservatory.

Concert Hall Two: Workmen take a break on the scaffolding, high above the Concert Hall (Nov 1979). Photograph @ Peter Bloomfield

Over the last 30 years the Barbican has become one of London’s most photographed buildings and it’s cultural legacy bolstered more so with time – the Centre now remains as a thriving culturally host and with modernist properties increasingly in popular demand, flat sales are scarce and highly in demand.

Foyers: The seats of the Concert Hall stalls, seen from the lower Foyers (Nov 1979). Photograph @ Peter Bloomfield

A quick online search of the Barbican returns a plethora of traditional architectural photography, polished images throughout the last three decades. In contrast to these familiar representations, Peter Bloomfield recently shared his archive of over 1400 unseen negatives of the Barbican during the last four years of its construction. Commissioned by the first Managing Director of the Centre, Henry Wrong, Bloomfield was given free reign to document the arduous construction of London’s modernist icon, which in it’s entirety took 14 years. His images remind and reveal to us the painstaking attention to detail and labour-heavy process of creating many features we associate the Barbican with; Bloomfield documents in black and white the transformation of smooth concrete to a the iconic textured concrete which was jackhammered all by hand.

Foyers: A construction worker hand-drills the textured effect on the Foyer walls. Photograph @ Peter Bloomfield

Bloomfield’s unbiased recordings of the Centre that rose from a post war cavern are an importantly cultural record of how buildings of this scale were brilliantly conceived and quite miraculously were still realised after 30 years of planning. These images are valuable records of what 20^th century construction were like, and are unlikely to ever return to – in a landscape when skyscrapers are built in a comparatively small amount of years and space is as valuable and scarce as ever, the likelihood of a building of this size and scale to be ever made in the UK are slim. Building the Brutal, takes us through an important brutalist journey, representing construction that we rarely get to see; the book and website together re-imagine the modernist process while celebrating the pure scale and ambition behind the project.

Conservatory: A tree makes its way into the Conservatory from Silk Street via crane (Mar 1980). Photograph @ Peter Bloomfield

by Stephanie Clair

Building the Brutal is published by the Barbican and is available now by clicking here. Peter Bloomfield’s archival photography is also available to view via the accompanying website.