With a notoriously contentious brutalist appearance, the National Theatre stands on the South Bank of the Thames, next to Waterloo bridge. Completed in 1976. Internally and externally, the rough-cast concrete surface of the National Theatre shows the imprint of the sawn wooden planks used in the casting process, which were supposedly each only used twice, once on each side.

Architect Denys Lasdun

Denys Lasdun was appointed as architect to the project in 1963. With no previous experience in theatre design, he persuaded the board of theatre directors, designers and technical experts to give him the job without a team alongside him but with the drama of a solo-performance.

“Most of the architects came in groups with their partners… but very theatrically, Denys Lasdun arrived entirely alone” said Laurence Olivier, former director of the National Theatre.

Mixed Reviews

Architectural opinion was split at the time of construction. Most notoriously, Prince Charles described the building in 1988 as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting”.

Sir John Betjeman, said “It is a lovely work and so good from so many angles“.

Love it or Hate it

Despite the controversy, the theatre has been a Grade II* listed building since 1994. It is now in the unusual situation of having appeared simultaneously in the top ten “most popular” and “most hated” London buildings in opinion surveys. In 2001 a Radio Times poll featured Denys Lasdun’s building in the top five of both the most hated and the most loved British buildings.

References: Dezeen, Denys Lasdun, National Theatre, Wikipedia.

The Barbican estate was built between 1965 and 1976, on a 35-acre site that had been bombed in World War II. The complex was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, whose first work was the ground-breaking Golden Lane Estate immediately north of the Barbican. The Barbican Redevelopment Scheme was a project of staggering scale and complexity. It took nearly three decades to design and build; involved the design of over 2,000 flats, two schools and an arts centre; it required the realignment of an Underground line and the excavation of 190,000 m³ of soil and at its peak employed a thousand workers.

The Grade II listed Barbican Complex is a success story of brutalist architecture. Unlike Robin Hood Gardens, which has been neglected to the point of demolition, the Barbican has a mix of private and social housing and apparently huge maintenance fees to pay for the upkeep.

The appeal of the area is in a great part due to the recent soft replanting giving a more luscious effect to contrast with the hard structures. Quoting from the planting designer Nigel Dunnett’s excellent website:

The concept for The Barbican plantings is to create continuous and successive waves of colour over long periods of time, through orchestrating a series of dramatic colour washes over the entire site, from spring through to late autumn, and then to finish off the year with a textural array of seeds heads, plant structures and foliage.  Although the plantings are very diverse, at any one time it is only two or three plant species that create the main flowering display.  But these species are repeated over the whole area, creating maximum impact.  I plant in layers so that one set of plants grows up and though the preceding set of plants, leading to that continuous succession.  Naturalistic swathes of perennials and grasses are framed and contained within clumps, groupings and scatterings of multi-stemmed trees and shrubs to give solidity, and a three-dimensional framework throughout the year…

For more details visit nigeldunnet.com/barbican

References: Barbican.org, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, Wikipedia, Nigel Dunnett.