Lecture write up: Peter Barber on stage

Peter Barber spoke this month in the Barbican’s main auditorium - the first post-Covid instalment of the Architecture Foundation’s (AF) acclaimed Architecture on Stage series.

It was an appropriate come back – a presentation littered with images of buzzy pre-mask streets, and a talk which read like a love letter to vibrant public space, it was a great reminder in both form and content of what we have been missing.

Peter Barber Architects is everywhere at the moment. Adding to the litany of awards, in 2021 the practice won four RIBA London awards and picked up the AJ100 award for contribution to the profession. Recently the firm has completed schemes include a tenement-style housing scheme in Peckham, a homeless hostel in Holmes Road, and a re-imagining of back-to-back housing typology in Stratford that have been covered extensively by the architectural press. 

All but one of the buildings created by Peter Barber’s office are in London, where the practice has been based since its establishment in 1989, giving the work its strong vernacular language. Peter Barber is outspoken and political – ‘vocally socialist’, he is architecture’s flag bearer for social housing. The first part of the talk was spent situating his work in a history of social housing in the UK – its decline more aptly – and he sees his work as a proud rebuttal to this narrative. 

His design approach to a humane housing for all, as AF director Ellis Woodman’s introduction identified, is informed by a strong sense of 19th century ideas of the city. Weaved throughout projects presented were traditional architectural tropes that have often not only fallen out of fashion, but in some cases are virtually prohibited by legislation and design guidance. Front doors that open directly on to the street, without any of the so-called ‘defensible space’ required by most planning policy, which Barber argues actively encourage residents to occupy the space outside their front doors (see Donnybrook Quarter). Narrow alley-like mews streets that are considered ‘too narrow’ by most design guidance, which Barber identifies necessitate a rich kind of social interaction (see Ilchester Road). Back-to-back houses that achieve densities that would otherwise be impossible at a similar mid-rise scale, that have been carefully reworked to over-come the historic shortcomings of the typology (see McGrath Road). Early 20th century cottage flats that achieve the feat giving every home a front door on the street, and a private outdoor space that the office has re-imagined for the modern needs of the city. Condensed terraces which challenge the assumption enshrined in land law that gardens must create islands of space between neighbours.

These are humane architectural and urban ideas. Barber has re-visited them for the ways in which they cultivate a relationship between the domestic and the public, rather than erecting a barrier between them (although as is typical when looking at the practices work, glimpses of the domestic interiors are tantalisingly fleeting). The layering of different spaces is intended to positively promote street life and social integration and gives his projects a kind of permeability that people and culture can grow into. There is a strong sense weaved through the talk of a golden age of social integration such as might have been found on pre-war east end streets (the kind rendered beautifully by Family and Kinship in East London) – a quality of street-life swept away by the slum clearances of the modernist period. Peter Barber addresses this directly when he says that some of the older residents in Ilchester Road (a narrow mews in Barking) who spend mornings drinking tea with neighbours in small front gardens, have in fact described their new houses as a kind of ‘home-coming’.

Wherein lies Peter Barber’s genius is that his respect for these kind of 19th century urban forms is not a historicist and pastiche re-rendering. The projects are not nostalgic. Not only do the buildings look modern, expressive of the current moment, but they are also future-orientated offering glimpse of a different, better city. How he achieves this is the quiet alchemy of the practices work but it is clearly helped along by the way these traditional ideas are critically unpacked before they are re-deployed. For instance, the key short-coming of the back-to-back typology (that terraces were single aspect) is overcome at McGrath Road through a set-back at the top-story that facilities windows on the side elevations also creating spaces which can then be given over as the extra bright living rooms.  In this way, when Barber talks like this there is this wonderful sense of that line of architectural conversation, ruptured by the modernist movement, being re-kindled.

This integrative reconciliation with pre-modernist ideas is evident in other aspects of his work too. The strong poetic, artistic streak which runs through the projects for instance – Oriel windows on softly chamfered corners, urban plans set out by picturesque sightlines, and his trend-setting mastery of arched forms. The work is also particular rather than general – an alternative to the universalism of the modernist movement. At one point Barber says explicitly that you’d need good knees and a gregarious nature to live in the project he was describing – but that this is not a problem because there should be ‘different types of housing for different types people’. Though a truism in the private residential sector, this sentiment is made radical in the context of the public housing Barber builds. 

Finally, and perhaps most literally, the connection with the past bears out in the deep respect the practice holds for old buildings. Quoting Jane Jacobs, this is not just about the eye-catching heritage buildings, but the plentiful supply of ordinary old buildings that make vibrant cultural life possible. Bravely, Peter Barber addresses the environmental implications of this, quoting some research which found that a high performing new sustainable building takes 30 years to make up for the embodied carbon lost in its demolition. However, given the climate crisis, there is definitely more to be said here, and it was interesting that sustainable building was so little covered elsewhere in the talk. 

The virtuous circle of the practices work, and an interestingly under-sung aspect during the talk, is that these design moves also make Peter Barber schemes, in contemporary parlance, incredibly ‘viable’. Combined with his adept use of modest materials (render, brick, timber), that makes the practices schemes highly affordable to build and able to achieve a density that other urban forms are unable to get close keeping to similar building heights (low to medium rise in Barbers scheme’s, capping off at the scale of a mansion block). This really is nothing to be ashamed of.

There is a nice bit of the talk when Peter Barber talks about the small shop where they are based in Kings Cross, and quoting Lina Bo Bardi, talks about the moral imperative shop owners have to contribute more broadly to the life of the city. There is no doubt that this small office of only six is doing quite this. 

Georgie Day is an architectural designer at Hudson Architects