I spent a week in London with my team at Automattic—our first time working together in person in a while. It had been five years since my last visit to the city, and being back felt both familiar and surprisingly fresh.
One of the highlights of the week was a guided tour of the Barbican. Somehow, I had never been there before, and this visit reshaped the way I see London.
The Barbican is often described as a brutalist icon—but our guide noted that some architecture purists challenge that label. The use of rounded forms and decorative flourishes makes it an outlier in the brutalist canon. But labels aside, I was captivated.
What struck me most was the vision behind the project. While not built as social housing, the Barbican was imagined as a self-contained, thriving community in the heart of the city—a bold, almost utopian experiment in post-war urban living.
I was drawn to the interplay between heavy concrete and lush gardens, and the way the entire complex is shielded from car traffic, despite being designed in an era centered on commuting by car.
Whether or not it’s strictly brutalist doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that the Barbican represents an architectural legacy rooted in social ideals and urban optimism.
I tried to capture that spirit in a series of photos—details, shapes, and perspectives—shot on both my phone and a vintage Sony Cybershot digicam that I just bought at Palermo’s flea market.
