in 2008 Before and after
Second World War service in the army, Lasdun worked for a while with
Berthold Lubetkin's
Tecton practice, becoming a partner. During this period he also completed one private house in
Paddington, in
Le Corbusier's style. After the war, Lasdun worked with Lindsay Drake on the
Hallfield Estate, which had been planned by Lubetkin and Tecton in a similar patterned, tightly planned idiom to his Spa Green and Priory Green Estates. Lasdun's Hallfield School was the first clue to his mature style, in its use of bare concrete and angularity, as well as its more human scale. In the 1950s he was a partner with
Jane Drew,
Maxwell Fry and Lindsay Drake in
Fry, Drew, Drake and Lasdun. His originality became more evident in his 'cluster blocks' in
Bethnal Green. These were a response to the critique of much post-war development for creating an isolating environment and discouraging community. The cluster blocks grouped flats around a central tower, and tenants were intended to be able to pick out their own flats in the structure. The earlier blocks at Usk Street of 1954 were medium-sized, while the later block
Keeling House is high-rise. In the late 1980s Keeling House was slated for demolition by the
London Borough of Tower Hamlets, who had found it difficult to manage; following a pre-emptive listing was sold to a private developer for conversion to privately owned flats, and the Lasdun adjacent low-rise slab blocks of social housing were removed at the same time. Lasdun made an excursion into luxury housing with his St James' Place flats in 1958, the plan of which was partly derived from social housing models such as the
Narkomfin Building. post-
Second World War buildings Lasdun completed what may be regarded as his breakthrough masterwork in the
Royal College of Physicians building in
Regent's Park (1964). Inserted into a nationally important
Nash set-piece terrace of neoclassical form, the RCP projects a raised linear form perpendicular to the terrace to create a series of gardens and spaces around the building, with annexes for lecture hall and an historic timber panelled room preserved from the earlier Colleges. Using modern reinforced concrete technology and highly expressive structural methods, the volumes are made to 'float in space' on the slimmest of supports to dissolve spatial boundaries between inside and out. The work makes implicit references to the work of the 'high modernists' from le Corbusier and Mies to the 'Scandinavian modernism' of
Aalto,
Asplund and
Jacobsen as well as the contemporary
Brutalist aesthetics of the era, yet developing a personal idiom of opened cantilevered volumes, long perspectives, triangulated form, and clarity of concept and structure that is entirely Lasdun's own. This building, however, is finished in luxurious white Sicilian marble,
Murano glass mosaic tiles, polished brass and black engineering brick, and was one of the first post-War buildings to be awarded Grade I listing for national and international significance and influence on the work of others. ==University buildings==