Barbican. Os espaços exteriores e a relação com a cidade de Londres

Abstract

The presented dissertation has as its main issue the Barbican Estate, located in the British capital's center, precisely in the most important financial department of Europe: the City of London1. The development of this study pretends to approach, specially, the relationships between Barbican's users and the composition of the landscape, as well as to understand in what way the complex interacts with the surrounding city. Above all, a reflection is done of how the architectonic features of the complex reflect themselves on the human experiences as well as influence them, conditioning the way of how people live in this space and assigning a meaning that goes beyond the physical and spatial aspects. In an initial phase, the complex project is contextualized on the urban reconstruction plans of the Inner London, namely the Greater London Plan and later the plan of C. Holden and W. Holford, particularly aimed at the City. The intentions for the Barbican were pretty ambitious. It was intended to be a high quality neighbourhood, attractive to young entrepreneurs or City workers, with high status and enterprise capacity, making sure that their presence would in some way contribute to the development of the area and later to the development of London. In the sequence of the definition of the presupposes that determined what it was intended for the development of the City and after the alteration of the foreseen methodology for the zone of the reconstruction of the City, in which the area of the Barbican goes from commercial and financial to residential. The several proposals for the complex are discussed and developed with special attention to the plans of architects Peter Chamberlin, Geoffry Powell and Christof Bon, responsible for implementing the work. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon presented their first project in 1955 and later were forced to reshape and integrate their intentions in a plan previously developed by the entities responsible for Greater London and, more specifically, by the City. Thus, presenting their first redesign for a mostly residential complex which integrates the area previously established in 1956. Developing, from that moment, one of the most complete projects of collective housing from London's post-war brutalism, with strong character, principles of community organization and revealing a large formal influence by Le Corbusier. The project of 1956 was adjusted in 1959 and its subsequent amendments, which allowed the start of construction in 1963 and its completion in 1982. Finally, it's made a reflection about the composition of outdoor spaces and how they relate to their users and their experiences of daily life and even with the urban surroundings. Having as its main goal the attempt to direct the pedagogical development to a route that retrieves and assigns any role to other architectural works, at times, seemingly forgotten and that deep down, are increasingly a rich source of relationships between humans as users, the architectural space and social experiences.