BARRIE BARTON

Strategy & Insights Director, Right Angle Studio

Barrie Barton is a lawyer by qualification, an entrepreneur by nature and a passionate urbanist who has spent most of his adult life thinking about the relationship between where we live and the sorts of people we become.

In 2005, with his brother Chris he set up Right Angle Studio: a business dedicated to understanding and improving life in cities. Before the advent of social media they started Australia’s first independent city guides called The Thousands – a much-loved online publication that connected people in Australia’s state capitals with the discreet but worthwhile things going on in their city.

In 2007, frustrated by the unimaginative state of cinemas, Right Angle set up Rooftop Cinema on the top of Curtin House in Melbourne’s CBD. Rooftop Cinema was a forerunner in the global movement to bring movies into unusual urban places.

In 2012, they co-founded Sydney’s Golden Age Cinema & Bar as part of a broader involvement with the restoration of the iconic Paramount House. The building will soon include a hotel, cafe, workspaces and a rooftop health club, which is another business that they are involved in as founders and partners.

Right Angle has been engaged by large companies and government in Australia, South Africa and England, helping them understand what inner-city people will want in the future and how to build places that meet those needs. Barrie’s role as Strategy and Insights Director means that he leads and represents Right Angle’s thinking, with their clients, but also on the presentation circuit where he is regularly invited to make Keynote addresses.