Seeking a means of architectural intervention to transform the Barbican Center/Barbican Estate into a vehicle of restitution for looted artifacts currently held by the British Museum, we investigated traditional ceramic-making techniques from East Asia in conversation with the commercial network of the historic British Empire to uncover various ways in which a reimagination of “use value” and cultural production might facilitate a critique of Western museums’ collecting practices. Basically, we punched a traditional dragon kiln through an existing parking garage ramp within the the Barbican’s maze-like underground complex to dismantle the divisional sectional logic of the site’s multi-datum master plan, which was designed, in part, to surreptitiously segregate the functions of property-based capital accumulation and cultural consumption for the reason of consolidating the City of London’s political power through a demographic manipulation of their MP constituency, in turn forming an ideal breeding ground for the type of racialized neoliberal urbanism that would emerge from Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme. We also earmarked housing units within the Barbican complex to afford diasporic craft/creative communities and their broader networks of daily care a place of home and a communal means of production within a system formerly intended to exclude them.
