Barnabas Calder on Denys Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians


This year Denys Lasdun’s iconic Royal College of Physicians building in Regent’s Park celebrates its 50th anniversary, coinciding with the centenary of the architect’s birth. Barnabas Calder, architectural historian at the University of Liverpool, and Lasdun expert, describes why it is still one of Lasdun’s best, and also best-preserved, buildings


Blueprint

The strongest architecture of the Sixties can feel like a reproach to today's architects. The sheer monumentality, legibility and robustness of Kahn's galleries, Rudolph's architecture school or Lasdun's National Theatre seem to brand as dishonest and flimsy in comparison to the many layers of insulation, weatherproofing and cladding that are the normal route to environmental performance today.

Denys Lasdun, who would have turned 100 in September, is best known for exposed concrete architecture. His National Theatre (1969-76) and University of East Anglia (1965-69) are concrete inside and out. His strongly articulated housing estates and school building of the Fifties expose their concrete structures with a clarity inconceivable now. In the early Sixties, however, he produced a building which deviated from this exposedconcrete norm: the Royal College of Physicians headquarters, which opened 50 years ago this November, and whose structure is clad in elegant porcelain and highly crafted engineering brick.

The covering of much of the RCP's concrete might be taken for a loss of nerve in the face of a prestigious site overlooking Regent's Park, or submission to pressure from a powerful or stubborn client. In fact, though, Lasdun appears to have enjoyed the possibilities of a wider material palette, and the RCP represents an abortive but potentially rich alternative route for British Modernism as it emerged with newfound confidence from the period of post-war austerity. The building is luxurious and elegant, certainly, but neither effete nor populist.

At the RCP, Lasdun exploited the freedoms of an unusually generous budget to choose finishes with stronger contrasts of colour and texture than are generally possible in concrete alone, and worked them into expressive art in which optimism and pessimism seem juxtaposed in architectural dialogue.

The white-tiled library floats above the entrance on three improbably slender piers. Its whiteness, symmetry and columns echo the Greco-Roman and Renaissance traditions of portico and temple frontispiece. Yet here these classical models have been updated with heroic 20th-century engineering, using fewer, thinner columns than a stone building could have dreamed of. Lasdun's twin admirations for the classical tradition in which he had been educated at the Architectural Association in the early Thirties, and for thrilling modern engineering, seem to come together in a tribute to all the highest achievements of human reason and art.

Beneath this modernised temple, a lumpen lecture theatre crawls asymmetrically, its organic form slug-like, and its twisting, distorted skin clad in rough-textured, tough, near-black brick. Where the library hardly seems to touch the ground, the lecture theatre seems to sink into the earth, glowering and opaque. Its melted walls, burnt brick and half-buried window have resonances of natural disaster or, designed at the height of the Cold War, nuclear aftermath. Although its brick is exquisitely crafted, the exterior of the lecture theatre is irrational, threatening and primeval.

Both the tile and the engineered brick have weathered little in 50 years, as was Lasdun's intention. Later painting has frustrated his hope that the exposed concrete service-housings on the roof and emergency stair north of the library would record the passage of time, marking the years with each streak of rain-borne dirt.

In addition to their artistic expressiveness, the RCP's materials echo the stucco fronts and slate roofs of the neighbouring Nash terraces. In both its contextualism and its use of claddings, the RCP offers a more productive example to today's practitioners than the superb but unrepeatable concrete machismo of late-Sixties' megastructures.

The RCP is clad, but in a manner communicative of structure and function. It is artistically expressive without being whimsical or kitsch, and it refers to its architectural context without deferring inappropriately to less important buildings just because they are old. In the Sixties, however, even such tough and restrained artistry was viewed as self-indulgent by some modernist critics. Pevsner abused it as 'postmodern' and others attacked the opulence of its materials. Lasdun withdrew from overt aestheticism, warning his fellow architects in a 1965 talk that 'the great art of architecture is the art of concealing the art of architecture'.

In Lasdun's work the concealment of art was never complete, and the RCP's current exhibition traces through his models, drawings, letters and construction photographs the architectural career of this extraordinarily dedicated and committed artist. The Anatomy of a Building: Denys Lasdun and the Royal College of Physicians is at the RCP until 13 February








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