Studio 2 is a Master of Architecture studio at the Melbourne School of Design which has been in operation since 2014. This review contemplates the studio as of Semester 1 2022, in which the Barbican Estate (London) was a site of investigation.

STUDIO 2 BARBICAN: A BRUTAL REVIEW

Vladimer: Where else do you think? Do you not recognize the place?
Estragon: [suddenly furious.] Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I’ve crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery [looking wildly about him.] Look at this muckheap! I’ve never stirred from it!
Vladimer: Calm yourself, calm yourself.
Estragon: You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!

–  Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Draw the Paradox

The first task for Studio 2 is to draw that which according to the logic of space and time cannot be drawn: a section, cut through a music video. This semester, we are to draw a section through Metronomy’s music video Never in a Month of Sundays (2014), shot in the Barbican Estate. Here the task is rendered doubly ironic because, in this particular music video, nothing much seems to happen. Watching the video is like watching a camera being tossed slowly around the Barbican, revealing blurred glimpses of its concrete and brick material fabric. Occasionally blue-collared figures drift into the frame, invoking labour, but any trace of narrative is superseded by devices of disorientation and circularity.

Parallels can be drawn between the Barbicanian music video – which through its relentless chiming repetition of the forlorn phrase “Never in a month of Sundays,” depicts futility – and Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic play, Waiting for Godot (1952), which wallows in irresolution. Metronomy’s circular music video portrays the Barbican as atemporal. Godot, likewise, is famous for its anti-plot which (to be reductive) consists entirely of waiting. Godot premiered in Paris in the decade prior to the Barbican’s construction, so perhaps there is something about the postwar Brutalist zeitgeist, as illustrated by these theatrical and constructed architectures, that echoes with a dark space/time irony.

In any case, this sets the tone for a semester of psychotropic dimensions and immaculate miscreations. We draw the paradox and move on.

Resident Residues

A few weeks later, the class occupies a lecture theatre to watch Beka and Lemoine’s film Barbicania (2014), a documentary that knits together interviews of the not-so-quotidian Barbican inhabitants. We meet a gardener, those who dwell in the lower floors, penthouse highflyers, an aspiring actor, and an elderly woman who lives at the estate’s periphery. Inequalities that permeate the site, often on a vertical scale, are subtly invoked.

The film provides rich multidimensional data for us to build a creative non-fiction context. This involves working together, as a class, to produce a single contextual physical model, and a set of contextual drawings, which allude to – but do not replicate – the Barbican. Through this critical study, we produce architectural and programmatic narratives rooted in Barbicania’s primary evidence, elaborating on intricacies that characterise the place. Around our 414m2 site, a spiky residential tower, gender neutral barber shop, malfunctioning plant room, weedy garden, systematic library and timeworn ground plane materialise. It is a collaborative, forensic process whereby we adopt the role of dreamy land surveyors – observing scenery, but also the worms.

Textual Contamination

After studying the context, we each design an unconventional brief for a ‘modest museum,’ with an emphasis on communicating our idiosyncratic agendas through language. It is thickly fluid how the work of each student contaminates the other, all the while maintaining its own distinct identity. We see Saran uncovering racialised discrimination of current Barbican workers, Simeon observing the historical exploitation of the estate’s construction workers, Maia’s Museum of Minor Disturbances, Nina’s Museum of Ruinenlust, Felix’s Candelabrum, and so on. Development of the project title is foundational. The title eventuates as a highly condensed contention for each project, and, to quote Juhani Pallasmaa out of context, every project ends up “…rather small in size, but dense in narrative and visual, tactile and emotional imagery.”

Inscriptions on Canson

In crafting our architectural proposals, we work towards final deliverables: three landscape, A1 Canson sheets – marked only with lines, and each infused with a single, deliberate colour. We also produce a single monochromatic model and a pre-structured journal. Much like the Barbican Estate itself, the deliverables are regimented (even Foucauldian) in description, but are rendered subtle and expressive through content.

Iterations dance back and forth, tightly, across scales and views. Through the 1:75 scale plan, a movement path and program is curated. In 1:75 section, we “design with difference,” controlling spatial variation. Exploded axonometric is a way to prise apart volumetric qualities. A 1:10 detail section – with projections – pushes meaning into the material, tectonic, and sensorial qualities of our spaces, where even the most banal corner is rendered visceral. On each page, three pillars of the studio begin to bear weight: the poetic, pragmatic and the political.

Uniquely, CA Grain 224 is the canvas of Studio 2. Of this very particular stock, Canson writes “[the paper is] perfect for artistic drawing…  allows you to quickly obtain subtle relief effects as well as shades between light and shadow.” On close inspection the paper is thick and springy. It has a fine grain texture, and it is off-white. When imprinted with cartridge ink, digital imagery gains a richer tonal depth, and ever-so-slightly bleeding edges. Through this subtle, tactile elevation of content, our final series of prints bears witness to a semester of rigorous process. The Canson becomes a palimpsest inscribed with a 13-week journey.

Critical Alchemy

Held in the MSD concrete basement – the “psychic remove of the everyday world,” as Sabine Wieber would say – the crit is a ritualistic affair, with the order of projects and panel of critics carefully curated to an indecipherable logic. Models are lined up on blackened tables; drawings are pinned onto blackened A-frames. An air of gravitas pervades the clandestine space. There is a fluency and a drive behind each presentation, behind each viva voce defence, which can only spring from the wells of deep immersion.

Although the crit is a marked moment in time, the substance of Studio 2 resides in its process.  A semester of Barbican never felt like a to-do list of tasks; but more like a narrative, or story, which you move through with slightly uncomfortable intensity. It’s a warped reversal of time that counters Basar, Coupland and Obrist’s Extreme Present. And perhaps this is a product of a pedagogy which picks all the sweetest fruits of old-world architecture schools – rigour through iteration, innovation through constraint, praising the immaculate – and serves them, alchemised, with a crucible of deep care and droplets of acidity.

X

As if in alliance with Metronomy and Beckett, Judith Rugg has penned an article titled The Barbican: Living in an Airport without the Fear of Departure (2012). Rugg’s characterisation of the brutalist Barbican as a static “airport” invokes the London housing estate as atemporal and placeless. Rugg writes:

In the Barbican’s urban hyperspace, all sense of the unpredictable is eroded in a permanently saturated, smoothed-out and illuminated ‘now.’

Defying all three cynics, Studio 2 ultimately exposed the cracks across this veneer of similitude and disorientation at the Barbican. Creeping below the bush-hammered surfaces, we examined the estate for persistent signs of idiosyncrasy, ritual and decay. What followed is a collection of socio-poetic architectural proposals which, like a tower of windows illuminated after nightfall, frame a series of humanistic stories. Our final exhibition at MSDx – in which a wall of spotlit A1s could be read as a façade of windows – multiplied this tower effect. These were the stories. And looking through the glass at our inscriptions on Canson, we momentarily forget that resolution, textual and architectural, is a construct.