MADE x Barbican

23 pieces of furniture built straight out of the Barbican's own architecture — waffle ceilings, boat-edge balconies, the lake terrace.

The Barbican was built on rubble — the Luftwaffe leveled Cripplegate in the Blitz, and what went up afterward through the 60s and 70s was meant to be exactly what raw concrete "brutalism" claims to be about: honest materials, public housing, a machine for living that didn't pretend to be anything else. The average flat on the estate sold for just over £350,000 in 2004. Average sales now clear £950,000.

MADE and the Barbican Centre just put out a 23-piece homeware collection built entirely from the building's own details — a coffee table shaped like the lake terrace's seating pods, ceiling lights that mirror the Concert Hall's coffered ceiling, a rug patterned after the boat-edge balconies. The design team went back to Miriam Howitt's original 1960s show-flat interiors, which is the right instinct — Howitt usually gets left out of the building's own story, credited entirely to Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

Prices start at £32. So did most of the actual estate's mythology: a public-housing aesthetic, priced now for people who could never afford to live inside the real thing.

Found via Wallpaper.