About this talk

Running time: 26 minutes

The late Sir Denys Lasdun evolved an architectural approach and vocabulary now widely recognised, and which can be seen in his major post-war works. He was awarded Britain's Royal Gold Medal in 1977, and a Knighthood in 1976.

In his talk he explains that he subscribes to a set of ideas relevant to himself, reasonable in quality and which engage with history. These ideas are about an architecture of urban landscape, which is an extension of the city or the landscape and which indeed seek to promote and extend human relationships. His buildings are related to other buildings which may be close in space however far off in time, but they do not make stylistic concessions to the past. The buildings in fact are often a metaphor for landscape and he tries to express this through a visual organisation of 'strata' and towers.

As the architectural historian William Curtis has pointed out in "A Language & A Theme" (RIBA Publications, 1976), this architecture of urban landscape turns its back on the transience and brashness of a merely mechanistic world, and tries to elicit basic responses and to unearth fundamental human meanings.