Boring planner blog

This is a warning to all non-planners reading this blog, you may find this installment boring.

If you've gotten this far then I am going to assume you know who Sir Ebenezer Howard was. If not you can probably guess by reading the sign pictured, that he was the "father of garden city movement." What is really funny/ironic about this lovely, fired and glazed plaque is that it is imbedded in a highrise on the south side of the Barbican Centre in London.

This is a picture of the northwest side of the Barbican Centre. It is a concrete, brutalist structure built east of Smithfield market begining in teh late 1950s in an area that had been basically destroyed by bombing in the Blitz. It is a complex that only John Portman could really love--a confusing maze of levels with very strong horizontal and vertical building elements, totallu cut off from the surrounding fabric. In essence, its the complete opposite of what old Ebenezer was shooting for in his garden city movement.

Having said that, Barbican Centre is also weirdly cool in a retro kind of way. That's enough planning talk for the day.