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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
The council estate that won Chamberlin, Powell and Bon the Barbican: 1950s flats around courts, a yellow tower with a curled roof, and a swimming pool, still lived in.
HousesModern movementFree
By 1950 the Blitz had left the City of London with five hundred residents, and the Corporation held a competition in 1951 to build council housing for the people who worked in it, on a bombed site north of Cripplegate. Three young lecturers at Kingston School of Art entered separately and agreed that whichever won would take the others into partnership; Geoffry Powell's scheme won, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon built Golden Lane between 1953 and 1962, and it was the job that got them the Barbican next door. It is the gentler of the two: a village of low blocks around courtyards, a sixteen-storey tower with a curved canopy on its roof and a yellow front, a swimming pool, a bowling green and a community centre, colour in the panels and light into every flat from two sides. It has been protected since 1997, its residents are fierce about it, and anyone can walk through to see how good the postwar promise could look.
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