The Barbican Estate: A Brutalist Vision

The Barbican Estate stands alone in London, a mammoth sprawl on forty acres featuring residential buildings, an arts centre, the Museum of London, a school, gardens and a lake. Architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who met while teaching at Kingston University, designed the Estate under the influence of Le Corbusier as a utopian vision of what life in the capital could be after World War II. Officially opened in 1982 and named for the Roman watchtower which once stood on…