Superblocks

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by muppet

This is in effect the whole Courbousien 'streets in the sky' ideal, where terra firma becomes the abode of cars and people walk around on walkways above, ultimately
becoming a second layer of street. The City of London (the Square Mile financial district) tried unsuccessfully to implement such a plan in the 1970s, leading to the absolute
mazes around the Barbican centre, and walkways to nowhere ending in blank walls when the scheme was finally abandoned. To access the brutalist centre (arts, gardens,
millionaire apartments, concert hall, Museum of London) the easiest way is to actually walk through the traffic tunnel they once thought would only be for cars. The crowd of
people all doing the same thing shows the failure of the scheme.

As you pointed out, the Barbican's carefully planned, multilevel 'mazes' of walkways were left stranded when the City abandoned its ambitious scheme to separate pedestrians and vehicles, which in order to work would have had to be carried out on a larger scale. Nonetheless, everyone walking through the traffic tunnel is missing out on something, because the Barbican is absolutely one of my favorite places to stroll around in London. Whereas for typical urbanism, the street is simply a vulgar catchbasin for all modes of transit between vertically stacked grids of neutral space, the Barbican's ascending and descending sequences of interpenetrating public areas offer a more interesting alternative, an architecture whose wayfinding and vertical dimension is complicated and engaging -- as illustrated in the section below:



Or in this photo, depicting a series of public terraces and private balconies overlooking a public square:



It's not like the Barbican is really some sort of 'failure', as you describe it -- people are dying to live there, and the smallest of those flats is worth a fortune.

Anyhow what, in principle, is wrong with separating pedestrians and vehicles? The town of Guanajuato, Mexico, did it a couple decades earlier than the Barbican (converting 19th-century underground drainage canals for vehicle traffic), and the results are rather lovely:

Originally Posted by dubu

It looks like there’s commons areas but there’s no stores. It’s lacking trees too. Those are like the main points to superblocks.

Not only does it have trees, it has a whole conservatory for tropical and desert flora, complete with ponds for aquatic plants and multilevel walkways; it's London's second-largest conservatory after Kew Gardens -- all built around the fly towers of Barbican Theatre, home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is directly below it.

[dubu]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

old hat

If it’s old then bring it back, it’s better now with electric bikes. Just one street through the superblock and bike trails. Like in Europe.

[dubu]

im making this 3d. ten stories for the black and ten stories for the blue. chicago size blocks

[IMG][/IMG]

[dubu]

whats cool with big block size is you dont have to have a subway, the blocks are as long as the blocks. just have the trains go where theres big blocks. its usually along a lake or something like chicago. this would be like a suburban apartment area compared to that place. the biggest city ive seen from a plane. im going to go there some day

[muppet]

The problem with the planning of the Barbican was for all the good intentions that were laid out for the pedestrian realm, the fact was the quickest/ most obvious way (rather than entering nondescript awnings and having to climb up and down stairs and cross bridges) into the complex, especially from the tube or surrounding streets, was directly into the road tunnel, after which you were 'out of the loop'.



If ever you rejoined the pedestrian realm, you were however also stuck in a maze on several levels:



some of which you'd have to climb up and down needlessly for having to traverse through different buildings from the one you wanted:




In short lovely, luxury brutalism very much in vogue, but great only for the initiated.

The Barbican of course is so named (after castle defences) due to the impermeability of itself, islanded from surrounding street access. One cannot just walk into it. Rather you'd have to spin round, cross the road in the opposite direction and enter specific buildings that will lead up to bridges in order to get onto the pedestrian system.