The Barbican Café

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”

Albert Camus

The cavernous halls and tectonic walkways of the Barbican’s interior strike me like a hammer; one feels like an ant walking the palace hallways of an extinct alien species. Brutalism’s answer to the question of public architecture was, minimally, novel; to reject the fascism of beauty that had animated aesthetics for centuries in favour of a stark, stalwart monumentalism devoid of ornamental flourishes and prissy superfluousness. 

Unfortunately, it is an ideology that does not translate into baking well - at least when using the current pâtissier’s dictionary. Huddled, as if hiding in shame, to the right of the entrance walkway, the café’s self-service cakes are piled carelessly like war crime corpses. The barista serves a soulless coffee as if he is one of their number. 

The banana bread is a seemingly impossible and deeply unappetising elision of the dry and the wet; a material impossibility that should have remained in conceptual limbo. It is arid without being redeemed by a satisfying crumble, and any moisture only provides a form of dead springiness reminiscent of flesh taxidermised with jello. The marginal strip of goo running along its upper crust —  that I had saved for last in the hope that it would provide the thinnest of redemptions — only affirmed its ineptitude; a formless, bland matter which barely gave an indication of the ripe sweetness it had, presumably, aimed to embody.

Sitting on the terrace, among rocky angles and sheer expanses of rough concrete, I had hoped that the Barbican’s baked offerings would fleck the jagged surroundings with a moment of ephemeral joy —  like the flashes of botany tumbling from windowsills and blooming from streams. Unfortunately, the disappointment only brings out the abrasive grey of the architecture — a gustatory tundra laid atop an architectural wasteland against the backdrop of a humid and overcast London day. 

Nabakov’s monkey was taught to paint and, when given a brush, chose to depict the confines of its cage. In a similar fashion, the Barbican’s banana bread loaf only serves to emphasise the bars of our own existential cage more sharply — a world that is frequently barren, bleak and blandly disappointing. Sometimes a frustrated pleasure is worse than the dull tedium it was intended to provide an escape from — and, therefore, sometimes it is not worth searching at all.