Best in show

“Our exhibition celebrates 50 years of the Royal College of Physicians’ spectacular, Grade I-listed modernist building as well as the centenary of the birth of its designer, Sir Denys Lasdun, whose reputation as a ‘brutalist’ architect has undergone something of a transformation in recent years.

By the 1950s, the college had outgrown its old home in Trafalgar Square and, wanting to take a more focused role on public health, commissioned a building – complete with a huge lecture theatre – on a corner of Regent’s Park where permission was granted to demolish a bomb-damaged Nash villa.

Having initially turned down the job after being asked to design a neoclassical building, Lasdun eventually set to work on a scheme that would not only express the college’s own modernisation but also encompass its 500 years of ceremonial history.

The collection of oil paintings, an ancient library and the wonderful 17th-century oak-panelled Censors’ Room were all enclosed within a concrete and glass modernist structure.

In the words of the Crown Estate, Lasdun had to ‘match and rhyme’ with the surrounding houses while he himself talked about incorporating ‘the clobber of ancestral memories’.

Lasdun spent eight weeks at the Trafalgar Square premises simply watching what went on there. I think that’s why his designs aren’t similar as he tended to respond to the location and specific function of each building.

He was also working on his designs for the National Theatre in the later stages of working on the college, which might explain why ours features some very dramatic touches of its own.

There’s one of the few hydraulic walls from the 1960s still in working order, for example; the original idea was that guests would enjoy pre-dinner drinks in one room before the wall rose to usher them into the main double-height dining room.

As you can see from the model, the facade is quite blank as Lasdun decided that the building had to be an enclosed precinct turned away from the park, a place of contemplation where no one would be distracted from their work by a great view.

Similarly, the sunken lecture theatre spares everyone from traffic noise.  It’s exciting for me, as a curator, to see such a beautifully designed, thoroughly modern building housing such important historical collections; it’s a theatrical and ceremonial centrepiece that serves many functions simultaneously.

And now this model of the college is a work of art in its own right; Lasdun was, of course, working long before the advent of computer-aided design, producing impressionistic sketches for his very talented modelmaker Philip Wood to translate into three-dimensional form.”

The Anatomy of a Building: Denys Lasdun and the Royal College of Physicians runs until 13 February

Emma Shepley is the curator at the Royal College of Physicians, London