The opportunities for stereo duplication within the Barbican were diverse, reflecting the range of interior, exterior and transitional public spaces at different scales that one has access to there. I wish to describe here one image of a northerly section of the complex, within the undercroft colonnade space of the apartment blocks around Beech Gardens to invoke through description the potential of the raw print of the Stereo Adapter as a productive reordering and fragmentation of the architectural photograph, toward a reinvention of, to recall F E Wright’s words, the ‘spatial relationship between details’ and the ‘story of the field relations between certain features’.
One of the building’s massive jack-hammered pilotis, a signature component of the public spaces of the Barbican, is the ‘central’ referent of this image, but its centrality is, of course, immediately displaced and doubled. Its role in a stable and legible order of perspective depth within the colonnade and the garden’s rectangular lake is fragmented, and we see instead an ambiguous cluster of four columns. The doubling of the nearest column now suggests the cruder structural system of a sub-flyover space, whereas in the mid-ground beyond, columns are subject to varying levels of dissolution, with one almost withered and substituted altogether by the central black ‘frame’-void of the stereo print. Distortions at the base of the print introduce an uncertain threshold, a blurred jetty of mirror play, confusing the boundaries between solid ground and water. A radical transformation manifests at the right-hand-side where the mirror mechanism of the adapter imports a slice of urban detail from outside the expected scope of the frame: one of the three iconic Barbican towers, Lauderdale, is compressed into a skeletal slice of balcony and frame, reduced to a quarter of its actual thickness but still coherent as architecture and reminiscent of the slimmest of Hong Kong’s high-rise dwellings. This right-hand region of the image is configured like an arched aperture, or even a transparent column, and overlaid with a faint screen of dirtied orange, encouraging our gaze out to zones beyond the limits of the Barbican, where a blander, more recent office street façade pushes into the frame. The fetishised homogeneity of the Barbican enclave is broken by a sudden reminder of the wider contexts and conditions of urban modernity. q
Stereo print of Barbican Centre, 2019
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
on site review 39: Tools 12
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