London, south bank of the Thames, 1976. Queen Elizabeth II opens the Royal National Theatre, a complex of exposed concrete made of stacked terraces descending toward the river like the layers of an artificial cliff. Prince Charles will call it, a few years later, in a since-famous speech, «a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London». Its architect, Denys Lasdun, does not much mind: he has spent an entire career building buildings that look like landscapes, and this theatre, with its terraces deliberately meant to be occupied by the public even before they step inside, is the fullest synthesis of that idea.
Layers like stratified rock
Lasdun is born in London in 1914, into a well-off Jewish family, and studies architecture at the Architectural Association. He works for Wells Coates and then joins the Tecton practice, led by Berthold Lubetkin, where he takes part in social housing projects in the 1930s. After the war, during which he serves as an engineer, he founds his own practice and develops a personal take on the Modern Movement, distant both from Mies's polished minimalism and from Le Corbusier's raw, direct concrete: his buildings grow in horizontal layers, like geological formations, with rough surfaces that welcome ageing rather than hiding it.
The first building to fully show this idea is the student residence tower of Christ's College, Cambridge (1966-70), arranged in stepped terraces like a ziggurat, and the campus of the University of East Anglia in Norwich (1962-68), where the student dormitories, the famous «ziggurats», rise in receding terraces so that every room has a view and direct light, without blind corridors. Lasdun calls this principle «architecture as urban landscape»: a building should not merely occupy a site, it should build new walkable ground above it.
A theatre that is also a square
The commission for the National Theatre arrives in 1963, after decades of debate over where and how to build a British national theatre — an idea proposed as early as the nineteenth century and repeatedly postponed. Lasdun wins the commission and chooses not to make one single large volume, but to split the programme into three auditoria of different sizes (the Olivier, open like an amphitheatre; the Lyttelton, a traditional proscenium stage; the Cottesloe, today the Dorfman, a flexible studio) enclosed within a single block of concrete terraces descending toward the Thames. The outer terraces, conceived as a vertical public square, remain open even to those without a ticket for a show: one can sit, watch the river, have a coffee, without ever entering an auditorium.
Construction takes over a decade, amid delays, building strikes widespread across 1970s England, and design revisions, and final costs far exceed initial estimates. At its opening in 1976, architectural criticism is largely favourable, but the London public remains divided for years over the exposed concrete, which darkens quickly with smog and English rain, giving the building an appearance many judge gloomy. It is in this climate that, in 1988, Prince Charles's famous attack takes shape, becoming the symbol of a wider clash between the royal establishment, tied to traditionalist taste, and postwar Brutalist architecture.
Concrete's comeback
In the 2000s the verdict changes. In 1994 the building receives Grade II* status (among the highest protection levels for a twentieth-century building), and a restoration led by the Haworth Tompkins practice, completed in 2015, cleans the concrete surfaces, opens new public spaces at ground level and makes the terraces even more accessible and lively, with bars, markets and evening screenings. Lasdun, who died in 2001, did not see this second life of his most debated building, but wrote on several occasions that he had always thought of the National Theatre not as an isolated monument but as a piece of city, meant to be used even before it was admired.
Before the Thames: housing for the welfare state
Before the National Theatre, Lasdun trains on a very different site. In the 1930s he works at Berthold Lubetkin's Tecton practice, among the pioneers of the Modern Movement in England, and after the war he inherits, together with colleague Lindsay Drake, one of the projects left unfinished when that practice closed: the Hallfield Estate, a large public housing complex in Bayswater, London, built in two phases between 1951 and 1958. These are buildings conceived for Britain's postwar welfare state, with blocks arranged to give every home light and air, and a primary school, Hallfield Primary School, with hexagonal classrooms each opening onto its own garden.
These are also the years when Lasdun builds public housing in Bethnal Green, in London's East End, with residential towers breaking with the tradition of the terraced row house, and when he begins to develop the idea — which he will revisit on a monumental scale at the National Theatre — that a public building should organise collective space before its own form. The influence of these years is twofold: on one hand Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, as for nearly his whole generation; on the other, less predictably, the English Baroque architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose ability to give weight and monumentality to simple masses Lasdun admires. These are the two ingredients that, twenty years later, come together in the concrete terraces on the Thames.