Project 08, 3rd Edition (upcoming) Modern Construction Case Studies - Precedent: Barbican, London designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon

Against the Grain: Rewriting the Vertical City

Project 08 is a considered act of architectural resistance. Nestled beside London’s Barbican Estate, it rejects the logic of vertical expansion that increasingly dominates the city’s skyline, choosing instead a quieter, more critical form of engagement. This retrofit of an existing office building does not seek to compete with the surrounding towers but instead edits the urban fabric with precision—removing, re-scaling, and reinterpreting. It becomes an intervention that is at once modest in height yet ambitious in intent.

Drawing from the spatial logic and civic ambition of the Barbican Estate—designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon—the project reimagines its formal language without mimicking it. Rather than replicate the monumentalism of its Brutalist neighbour, Project 08 reorients the building’s mass into a series of terraced forms that step down toward the Barbican Centre’s conservatory. This terracing, inspired by Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre, frames a sequence of exterior landscapes and public-facing edges that choreograph movement across the site. Here, architecture becomes not a static object but a layered terrain, responsive to both its topography and its urban relationships.

Central to the project’s theoretical underpinning is the notion of contextualism, informed by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City (1978). Rather than erase the past in pursuit of the new, Project 08 works with and against its inherited conditions. The building is treated not as a tabula rasa, but as a palimpsest—where strategic subtractions enable new spatial and programmatic potentials. The removal of two upper floors, for example, is not merely a reduction in height, but a recalibration of scale: it brings the building closer to the human, the civic, and the street. In doing so, it aligns with Aldo Rossi’s conception of the city as a vessel of collective memory, where urban identity is constructed through the persistence and transformation of type.

This typological thinking becomes a tool for resistance—resistance to the homogenizing tendencies of global capital, to the anonymity of glass towers, and to the erasure of local character. The project’s reinterpretation of the office as a collegiate headquarters form is part of this resistance. It seeks permanence not through iconicity but through embeddedness, inviting slower forms of engagement and longer cycles of use. The architectural language is tectonic and grounded, favouring depth over spectacle. It draws from Kenneth Frampton’s call for a critical regionalism—an architecture rooted in place, in material, and in cultural continuity (1983).

By foregrounding adaptive reuse, the project also contributes to contemporary conversations on sustainability and the ethics of preservation. It positions architecture as a process rather than a product, where design emerges through careful negotiation with what already exists. This is not preservation in the conventional sense, but transformation as an act of care—care for the city’s history, its public spaces, and its environmental future.

In sum, Project 08 is an architectural fragment that resists resolution. It neither retreats into nostalgia nor charges forward into unchecked development. Instead, it stands as a quiet provocation—a reminder that architectural meaning is not found in height or novelty alone, but in the dialogue between past and present, solid and void, context and invention.

References
Rowe, C., & Koetter, F. (1978). Collage City.
Rossi, A. (1982). The Architecture of the City.
Frampton, K. (1983). Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.
Lasdun, D. (1984). Architecture in an Age of Scepticism.