The Royal National Theatre from Architectural Review to TikTok

@whoresonlybathroom, ‘Brutalist architecture needs to die’, TikTok screenshot, 17 December 2019

Denys Lasdun’s Royal National Theatre (1976) in London has provoked more quips than most buildings. Prince Charles’s infamous soundbite—’a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting’—is not even the most fanciful. ¹ Quoted in William Curtis, Denys Lasdun: Architecture, City, Landscape (London: Phaidon, 1994), 193. One critic gushed ‘Shakespeare might call it the broach and gem of all the nation’, ² John Barber, Daily Telegraph, 12 March, 1976. Quoted in Daniel Rosenthal, ‘Architectural History of the National Theatre: Part Two 1963-1976’, The National Theatre, 2015, https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/architectural-history-of-the-national-theatre-part-two/gQ4MNaMU. while readers of the Observer voted it the worst building in Britain in 1989: ‘looks like a warehouse for tinned food’. ³ Quoted in Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete: the beauty of brutalism, (London: William Heinemann, 2016), 330. All this for a building that—as historian Mark Girouard wrote in a special 1977 edition of the Architectural Review (AR) dedicated to the project—’could never be described as either gay or festive…it is a serious building’. ⁴ Mark Girouard, ‘Cosmic Connections’, The Architectural Review 161/959 (1977), 7.

In his own serious analysis, Girouard partly blamed the concrete for this sobriety; rendered dynamic by shadows cast on a sunny day, but dour in the rain. He wrote that huge blank walls of the stuff to the rear presented an unappealing approach: a lack of directional clarity extending to some sequences within. These were minor failures, however, in a richly choreographed network of atmospheric theatres and public connections, opening the theatre to the city. Reviews in the same issue from historian William Curtis and editor Colin Amery struck a similar balance. ⁵ Colin Amery, ‘Conclusions,’ The Architectural Review 161/959 (1977), 70.

The difficulty, as Curtis saw it, was in writing an impartial review so soon after completion, with the theatre already out of architectural and fiscal fashion. Planned in the heady 1960s—with Britain’s economy optimistic, and concrete architecture the idiom of the welfare state—by the time it opened, Britain was in financial crisis. ⁶ See Barnabas Calder, ‘“The sweetest music you will ever hear”: structural and programmatic uses of concrete by Denys Lasdun & Partners’, The Journal of Architecture 20/3 (2015), 376-418. Public and critical taste had already turned away from big-government monuments, associated with the perceived failure of mass social housing, towards Postmodernism, High-tech flexibility and what Curtis labelled ‘the petite, the anonymous and the vernacular’. Curtis’ still-radical call was to judge the building for what it really was, not only through ‘morality, sociology and politics’, but on aesthetic grounds too. ⁷ William Curtis, ‘Paste and Prejudice,’ The Architectural Review 161/959 (1977), 10.

While architectural commentators since have tended to echo the largely positive assessment of its functional and programmatic performance in AR, the theatre remains divisive. In staking their positions, believers and sceptics have frequently followed Curtis in considering the building on an aesthetic continuum from ugly to beautiful, evaluated according to how it affects their senses. These aesthetics positions have proven an especially polarising and well-documented barometer of the fluctuating value of these concrete Modernist monuments to the welfare state—what more recent accounts label generically as ‘Brutalism’—in critical and popular discourse, across print and online media.

In 1983, Nikolaus Pevsner grounded his judgment of the building in such an appeal to beauty. In the 1940s and 50s, he had staked his own aesthetic position against monumental urban objects in AR, advocating instead for Townscape planning: picturesque compositions of old and modernist architecture in visual harmony. ⁸ See John Macarthur, ‘“The revenge of the picturesque”, redux’, The Journal of Architecture, 17/5, 643-653. It was not surprising, then, that the core of his critique here was itself a critique of Girouard’s praise for an ‘aesthetic of broken forms’. Pevsner retorted that the theatre’s ‘various towers and turrets’ were an immodest distraction from the principle drama of the plays inside. While this vertical expression did help the theatre escape ‘Brutalism’—which he applied only to its more horizontal neighbour, the South Bank Arts Centre—he called the exposed concrete ‘a demonstration against conventional beauty’. ⁹ Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England London 2: South (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 353.

Similar prejudices lingered well into the 1990s, even after the theatre was Grade II heritage listed. Critic Peter Dormer, for instance, wrote that the theatre could only be ‘lovable’ if you put aside the ‘bleak vision’ of its concrete to consider its well-used public spaces and underlying ideas. ¹⁰ Peter Dormer, ‘Architecture: We can love the man who loves concrete,’ The Independent, 25 May, 1994. Lasdun, for his part, was outraged when a renovation by Stanton Williams architects’ proposed removing the lower terrace. He wrote that demolition would obstruct connections to the riverside promenade and mar its formal and axial arrangement: damaging its ‘geological strata connected…into the surrounding riverscape and city’. ¹¹ This metaphor comes from an earlier essay. Denys Lasdun, ‘Humanising the Institution’, The Architectural Review 161/959 (1977), 11. Despite what the renovation or Dormer’s article insinuated, a single element—terrace or rock-like concrete—could not be sliced so easily from the overall composition. Instead, his defence relied on firmly coupling function with aesthetic, visual considerations. Writing at a moment when ‘I am told people are beginning to acquire affection for it’, the terrace was ultimately retained. ¹² Denys Lasdun, ‘Why my National Theatre should remain untouched’, The Independent, 15 December, 1994.

By the Twenty-First Century, however, it was clear that this affection had survived intact. In 2001, Christoph Grafe praised Lasdun’s labyrinth of bridges, terraces and landscape-like tiers for setting the stage for a dizzying display of unprogrammed, public activities: its actors a cross-section of society. ¹³ Christoph Grafe, ‘Concrete Rocks on the Thames’, OASE 57 (2001), 30-43. A generation after Dormer, visitors could parse the theatre’s monumental concrete from its undesirable associations, relishing those internal and external public spaces that Lasdun christened the ‘fourth stage’ forty years earlier. ¹⁴ Lasdun, ‘Humanising the Institution’, 25-26. It is telling that Hugh Pearman’s review of another, more sensitive renovation—from Hayworth Tompkins in 2015, restoring original details—mourned the ‘the visual clarity of the fortress-wall appearance of the back’. ¹⁵ Hugh Pearman, ‘And now the encore’, RIBA Journal, 31 March, 2015, https://www.ribaj.com/buildings/and-now-the-encore. This wall, panned even in Curtis and Girourd’s complimentary reviews in 1977, had been obscured by a utilitarian extension.

Although Pevsner absolved the building of Brutalism, more recently Lasdun’s work has been framed as part of a broader reassessment of concrete, Brutalist architecture. Barnabas Calder acknowledged that Lasdun himself rejected the label but, nonetheless, included the theatre in his book Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (2016). He describes overcoming juvenile distaste for the style—‘associated with political corruption, rapacious developers, vainglorious utopianism and social failure’—regularly walking past the theatre, eventually stimulating ‘a buzz of fresh pleasure on every visit’. ¹⁶ Calder, Raw Concrete,14 & 339. In accounts like Calder’s, linking the building to Brutalism, the same concrete that was regularly cited as an impediment to popular appeal is, paradoxically, admired as one of its most beautiful aspects.

Swept up in this enthusiasm for concrete architecture, the theatre regularly appeared on the Brutalist social media accounts that rose to prominence in the 2010s. For historian Michael Abrahamson, administrator of FuckYeahBrutalism (220,000 followers, Tumblr), the appeal of his vintage images was tied to a particular moment of austerity following the Global Financial Crisis. By then, its rehabilitation complete, Brutalism seemed ‘evidence of a path out of austerity’, symbolising the generous governmental investment in architecture during the 1960s, rather than moral failure and economic collapse. ¹⁷ Michael Abrahamson, ‘Welcome to Brutalism’, The Times, October 25, 2015.

More recently, and more strangely, the theatre has resurfaced on TikTok. Compared to image-based Tumblr and Instagram, architecture rarely appears on TikTok, perhaps owing to its format—amateur, 15 second video clips—or its demographic: skewing younger than other platforms. Where the hashtag #Brutalism returns an astonishing 751,000 posts on Instagram, on TikTok there are less than 50. One popular Brutalist TikTok, liked 13,000 times, features user @whoresonlybathroom, superimposed over an image of the National Theatre, itself a screenshot from a review of Calder’s Raw Concrete in The Guardian. She faces the camera and lip-synchs: ‘somebody lied to her several times and told her that she was fly, hot and sexy and beautiful, and she’s nothing like that, she’s nothing of the sort’. ¹⁸ @whoresonlybathroom, ‘Brutalist architecture needs to die’, TikTok, 17 December, 2019. The lines were originally recorded in the 2016 season of Celebrity Big Brother USA, deployed on TikTok when a creator disagrees with consensus.

Such a sentiment is hardly even new. Others on social media with professional and academic credentials, including designer Adam Nathanial Furman (38,600 followers, Instagram) and historian Charlotte Lydia Riley (45, 900 followers, Twitter), had already used their platform to highlight the oversaturation of Brutalism in architectural culture. ¹⁹ Furman’s post read ‘In London you are never more than 70 meters from a student writing an essay on Brutalist social housing’. Adam Nathaniel Furman (@adamnathanielfurman), ‘#archiphorism’, Instagram, 5 May, 2019; Charlotte Lydia Riley (@lottelydia), ‘Neither “liking brutalism” nor “not liking brutalism” are a personality, guys”, Twitter, 8 July, 2019, 1:11pm. Understood in this context, TikTok users such as @whoresonlybathroom were rejecting the canonisation of the National Theatre—and the agreement of Calder and other critics who thought it beautiful—partly as a reaction against an opinion too broadly unquestioned for too long. Viewed with the fresh perspective of a post-GFC generation, the theatre might seem as ugly as it had to some critics in the 1970s.

Curtis’ might have addressed an architectural audience in AR, rather than amateur TikTok commentators, but his entreaty to consider aesthetics carried an implication of something more immediate, even truthful than other types of judgment. Although he might be vastly better trained than @whoresonlybathroom, bringing a cultivated knowledge of architectural history to his criticism, anyone can reflect on the affect of feeling concrete under our fingertips, or glimpsing the theatre on our phone screens. Indeed, as we have witnessed with the rise of social media, often the most popular and influential perspectives have come from these platforms and voices outside traditional criticism. At the same time, issues of ‘morality, sociology and politics’ have inevitably tinged these aesthetic judgments, producing an array of contradictory critical positions on the well-trodden ground of the South Bank.

In fact, it is precisely this divisive quality that points to the National Theatre’s value today. In its use of concrete, its labyrinthine circulation and its monumentality, the theatre has consistently polarised opinion and provoked unusually strong reactions, even on TikTok and other segments of the public that have not typically engaged with architectural issues. Such extreme disagreement prompts the sort of critical, aesthetic debate that helps prime and frame our own aesthetic judgments. When we are forced to judge the theatre, we identify qualities we appreciate—concrete or sculptural complexity—that we can apply to our judgment of other less notable or divisive buildings, contributing to our architectural literacy. Even for Calder, a scholar trained in the appreciation of architecture, the National Theatre acted as a gateway in recognising the wider appeal of Brutalism.

And in staking such a position, we become capable of better engaging with the built environment and civic society beyond. ²⁰ Philosophers such as Schiller have also located a civic function in aesthetic judgments. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in Literary and Philosophical essays: French, German and Italian, vol. 32, Harvard Classics (New York: PF Collier and Son, 1910), 221-313. Pressure from aesthetic disagreement played a tangible role in the preservation and refurbishment of the theatre, linked to the way visitors are allowed to traverse and engage with its public spaces. For Abrahamson, Brutalist images on social media provided a model for the government’s role in funding post-GFC public architecture, while raising awareness for the ongoing destruction of recent heritage. This might not have saved Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens from demolition, for instance, but its aesthetic appeal translated into debate on the provision of social housing, which had been neglected by successive British governments since the 1960s. ²¹ See Nicholas Thobyrn, ‘Concrete and Council Housing: The class architecture of Brutalism ‘as found’ at Robin Hood Gardens’, City 22/5-6, 612-632. Pevsner’s verdict arguably emerged from his own, deeply held conviction on the Townscape planning of post-war building in the city. Today, a much younger group has coalesced—becoming self-aware as a distinctive part of the architectural public—around a similar reaction against Brutalism on TikTok, which might well morph into more productive consideration of architecture and urbanism on the platform in the future. ²² Foster, drawing on Habermas, argues that critical perspectives on art help a subgroup develop self-awareness as a distinct part of a public. Hal Foster, ‘Post-Critical?’ in Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 115-124.

Framed in this way, the National theatre and other controversial and divisive architecture might be understood not as critical buildings themselves, but rather as buildings that attract criticism. Ultimately the real value of Lasdun’s theatre, I argue, is as a persistent locus of public criticism and critical engagement. And on those grounds, it deserves its place in the canon.