Future City

I have come into work an hour early to print out my CV as I have run out of black ink at home. Unfortunately so has my boss who sits only 2 desks away so there is no way he wouldn’t notice me printing out my CV. So I have an hour to kill and I’m buggered if I’m doing an hour of work.

Well it has been a busy few weeks. So I haven’t been blogging much. The sunshine has definitely been a factor in reducing my posts. Most evenings I much prefer sitting on a bench in the garden with a G+T and gossiping with Jo to going to type up a post! So what’s been going on? I shall write up my adventures in London the other week bit by bit.

I had one day on my own in London which was actually really odd. I can’t remember the last time I had this kind of time to myself with the choice of exhibitions, shops, etc before me. So I decided to visit the Future City exhibition at the Barbican.

I have only been to the Barbican once before when I was a child. I couldn’t really remember it very well and as the Barbican is an icon of architecture of a sort I thought I’d go. The exhibition was also curated by Future Systems, the Architecture firm famous for the Lords cricket ground and the Selfridges store in Birmingham.

I was interested to see how the exhibition was designed as much as its contents. The show attempted to bring together urbanist’s ideas for the future of the city from the 1950s to now. The first part of the exhibition spanned the 50s, 60s and 70s. Each major movement in urban design was represented from the Situationists to Archigram. There were some pretty spectacular models of the Smithson’s future house from 1956 and crazy living pods for space from the 1960s. I thought this part of the exhibition was very simply designed and easy to follow if a little bit boring. It felt like Future Systems had simply put together a history of urban design. There was no discourse on the success or failure of these ideas neither had they related them back to the modern day city.

Downstairs was put together differently. Projects rather than manifestos were the order of the day, running in approximately chronological order. The projects were interesting and included all the modern starchitects you would expect. Libeskind, Tschumi, Foster, OMA, MVRDV. It was an interesting collection and mostly in Model format but again there lacked any kind of discourse about the relevance of the ideas in the project on urban design and the future of the city.

I enjoyed my little visit to the Barbican though and wasn’t surprised to find it is difficult to find anything. The exhibition leaflets and the website just said The Barbican so I took an educated guess that it was in the main centre. Once I arrived after walking under a really ugly concrete road underpass I found no sign of it. In the end I asked at reception and they directed me up to the Art Gallery on the 3rd floor, obviously!

Right I shall publish this now and stick the pictures and links in later or it will just sit on my computer for another couple of weeks!