On Lasdun

In 2001 a Radio Times poll featured Denys Lasdun's National Theatre in the top five of both the most hated and the most loved British buildings.

Lasdun was the most admired British architect of the 1960s, and his masterpiece, the National Theatre, has come to be recognised as the quintessential post-war British building: big, strongly sculptural, and above all concrete.

In this lively illustrated talk to complement the exhibition, Concrete Reality, Barnabas Calder (University of Liverpool) discusses Denys Lasdun's work, his influences, his contributions to Brutalism and his design of the National Theatre. Calder will discuss why concrete was such a good material to use and trace how Lasdun's design process developed through discussion with theatre practitioners including Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Tynan, Peter Brook and Peter Hall.

Barnabas Calder is a historian of architecture at the University of Liverpool, specialising in British architecture since 1945. He read Modern History at Worcester College, Oxford, before an MA on medieval architecture at the Courtauld Institute and a PhD at the University of Cambridge's Department of Architecture, completed in 2006. He chose to study at Christ's College, Cambridge, because of its Lasdun-designed student residences, and persuaded the college to let him live in them for a year. He has catalogued much of Denys Lasdun's archive and written several articles and a short book on his work. Calder is currently writing Raw Concrete: a field guide to British Brutalism, to be published by William Heinemann. He is also working on an online complete works of Denys Lasdun, funded by the Graham Foundation with the RIBA British Architectural Library.

Supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.