THE BARBICAN!

Back to drawing buildings. My friends know that for a long time I have wanted to do something on The Barbican, not quite finding out the way of being true to this fascinating building complex. After my first visit in autumn 2008, when I had recently arrived in London, it made me think of a sci-fi set up in which it was the only civilised remnant in a dystopian future London, like a sort of a Noah's ark of culture among devastation.

However, like the Transformers there's so much more than meets the eye, and so massive it is the Barbican is full of secrets, hidden spots and nooks, a bit of a metaphor of London itself. So after many times wandering around the estate in my spare time, I went back to basics and, drawing inspiration from early works, resumed with the idea of giant straight forward Modernist creatures, something in between monsters and robots wreaking havoc on London. No hidden meaning, just postmodernist fun.

THE BARBICAN! is one in a set of three postcards, with one of the towers portrayed as some sort of Brutalist Godzilla with a dangerous aversion to Classic architecture.

Golden Lane Estate

Hardly noticed when compared to the neighbouring Barbican Estate, it’s hard to imagine the importance of the Golden Lane Estate (1957) as one of the first social housing schemes that in a matter of years would change the shape of the English landscape for good.

Designed by architects’ firm Chamberlin, Powell and Bon to house residents of the Cripplegate area after devastation of the City of London in The Blitz during World War II, once finished it became a symbol of Post War recovery and a referent for council housing across England. The fact that King Arthur House – in the image – was for a brief period the tallest tower block in England shows the ambition of the project.

However it would soon be surpassed by the massive scale of the Barbican Estate, built by the same architects immediately afterwards in a regeneration process that took almost 20 years to complete. It’s fascinating we can still look at Golden Lane Estate, as a surviving urban microcosm utopia at a time of architectural disenchantment.

See King Arthur House here.

Golden Lane Estate is postcard five of six designed for Bauhaus: Art as Life competition at the Barbican Centre.

Unité d'Habitation Marseille

Wow! A year off blogging. Oh well... I’ve been busy, I swear. Working on my first graphic novel which will be published this year! So hopefully now will have more time to upload stuff that is long overdue.

Let’s start with something I did last week! This illustration is part of a series of 6 postcards I submitted to Bauhaus: Art as Life, a competition at the Barbican. This one is inspired by the Unité d’Habitation Marseille by Le Corbusier. It is not really a Bauhaus architect, but his work pushes forward the Bauhaus principles of Modernist architecture and links it to Brutalism.

Christened as ‘Cité Radieuse’ this one is the first of a series of residential housing developments that he designed to ‘improve the living conditions for the residents of crowded cities’. This one in Marseille is a more realistic outcome to the urban megalomania of the ‘Ville Contemproraine’ planned for Central Paris. It comprises 337 apartments arranged over 12 stories and it is informally referred as ‘La Maison du Fada’. The madhouse.

Le Corbusier didn’t know that this ‘unité’ likes eating cars!

See the original building here.