Barbican Arts Centre - 'Purple Hibiscus'
Barbican Arts Centre - 'Purple Hibiscus'
Our conservation team helped to secure planning permission for 'Purple Hibiscus' - an ambitious commission created by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana.
Transforming the Barbican Centre’s Lakeside Terrace, the site-specific artwork dramatically enveloped the building’s iconic concrete exterior with approximately 2000 square metres of bespoke woven cloth, with 130 ‘batakaris’ – robes worn by Ghanaian kings – embroidered onto the artwork.
We worked alongside Allies and Morrison and Buro Happold to secure planning approval for the commission on behalf of the Barbican Arts Centre – a Grade II* listed building. The pick-hammered concrete of the listed building was protected by an intermediate mesh which wraps around the ventilation towers, with the fabric sewn onto this. A series of metal tension cables were attached to trusses that sat on the roof to provide the necessary structure. These tension cables were anchored to ballast on the Lakeside Terrace.
The work was woven and then sewn by hand to produce colossal panels of pink and purple fabric that fitted the brutalist planes of the Barbican’s Lakeside façade. The Barbican Centre stands on the former Cripplegate parish, which was largely destroyed during the Second World War. A centre for the ‘rag trade’ in London, the area was sought out for the buying, selling and production of cloth. Viewed together, the hand-stitched panels of Purple Hibiscus and the hand-pitted concrete of the Barbican’s rough concrete façade offered an expanded reflection on the relationship between the handcrafted and the monumental.
Client: Barbican Centre/City of London Corporation
Architects: Allies and Morrison