Et tu, Brutalism? Well, it’s about time the marmite style reviled by Classicists had a moment. Inside the béton brut of the National Theatre, a restaurant named after the building’s architect, Sir Denys Lasdun, pays homage to the theatre’s heritage while transporting diners to a vision of vintage Futurism.
‘Imagine you are in 1968,’ says John Whelan, creative director of the Guild of Saint Luke (GSL), the collective that took on the Lasdun redesign project last year. ‘Pierre Cardin’s space-age designs are dominating the catwalks. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is blowing people’s minds in the cinemas. The space race between the US and the USSR is reaching its peak and the moon landing is just one year away. The world was transfixed by the possibility of space travel and the final frontier. Work started on the National Theatre in this heady year for history. The interior of Lasdun is a time machine that transports the diner to this period.’
Having booked tickets to an evening performance, one crosses the National Theatre foyer (what Denys Lasdun called ‘the fourth theatre’) and enters the restaurant through a Mario Botta–inspired porthole-style door, agleam with patinated brass and mahogany, to a scene that steals elements of filmic visual style: the contrast between warm and cool tones, the retrofuturist design silhouettes and long bar of dark marble might have been framed by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve.
For inspiration, GSL made use of drawings from the National Theatre’s archives, as well as the canon of European Brutalism, referencing in particular Lasdun’s Italian contemporary Carlo Scarpa. Pendant lights suspended from Lasdun’s striking concrete coffers are inspired by the Belgian postwar designer Jules Wabbes, along with matching honeycomb sconces, while the bespoke three-legged chairs are an adaptation of Tobia Scarpa’s 1959 ‘Pigreco’ design. Elements of Lasdun’s original interior remain, including wenge-wood accents, stainless-steel panels and black-leather banquettes.
‘Our approach was a mixture of historic restoration and redesign,’ says Whelan. ‘For instance, we replaced the original windows from Lasdun’s design that had been removed for a previous incarnation of the restaurant. To do this, we accessed the archives of the National Theatre and faithfully reproduced the frames from his drawings. Where we dared to add our own design elements, we wanted to remain firmly within the period of the architecture, but we looked to Lasdun’s continental contemporaries for inspiration, particularly in Italy.’
Lasdun himself turned to Italy for inspiration in the late 1950s, preceding his design of the National Theatre. He found British architecture ‘boring’, but simultaneously, ‘tradition, for him… was the modern movement’. Architectural writer Diana Rowntree explained this contradiction – one of many for Lasdun – in a 2001 obituary for the architect: ‘He saw Classicism as a constant… and recognised the paradoxical link between the desire for total renewal in art and a deep attachment to the past.’ This sentiment has been sensitively echoed by GSL in the restaurant’s reinvention, and one wonders what Lasdun would have made of it.
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The architect was periodically afflicted with deep depression and was acutely sensitive to public opinion. ‘He never resorted to easy formulas, never strategically “chose his battles” as prudent policy recommends, but insisted on fighting them all,’ wrote his son James in 2003. ‘His oft-quoted remark to the effect that an architect’s role was to give his client “not what the client thought he wanted but what he never could have imagined existed” could be applied to himself too: he wasn’t satisfied with a job until it had brought forth something from himself that he could never have imagined existed.’
Lasdun was known to revere Modernism in his field but to dislike it in cinema and books, preferring pulp fiction. ‘[H]e lived entirely for architecture,’ explained James. ‘He was consumed by its challenges, obsessed by its possibilities, overwhelmed by its demands. He saw architecture primarily as a sculptural art of space, form and light… ’
Aptly, in the restaurant, brass-edged oblong mirrors reflect light diffused through gauzy curtains over Lasdun’s original windows. Luminous images of the sky at different times of day, shot by GSL collaborator Oskar Proctor, open up the space and echo its chiaroscuro. The experience is of being high up, suspended in cloud (one hopes not to be double-crossed by Lando Calrissian or encounter Darth Vader at the head of the dinner table).
‘Any restaurant should be an escape from the world outside,’ says Tom Harris, one third of the trio – including Jon Rotheram and John Ogier – behind popular East End pub the Marksman and now Lasdun. ‘Lasdun was designed as a response to the architecture it inhabits, but fundamentally it was designed as a restaurant in its own right. Lots of the thought behind the design was based on enhancing Denys Lasdun’s original design and working with the original material palette and adding softening elements.’
Closing the circuit between past and present, the lights in the private dining area, the Foyle Room, are designed by Joe Armitage, whose grandfather Edward Armitage was a friend of Lasdun. ‘Joe lives in Keeling House (WoI June 2021), another of Denys Lasdun’s buildings in Bethnal Green,’ explains Harris of the connection. ‘The Marksman is just down the road from Keeling House and Joe is a regular there.’
There is an obvious through-line between Denys Lasdun’s original restaurant design and GSL’s reinvention of it. The original architect’s legacy hovers like a hologram over the space, and one only needs to look at it in a certain way to recall the Modernist architect’s vision, influenced as it was by a certain time and place. The restaurant provides a new space for modern theatre-goers to experience and enjoy, without erasing the past. In a way, the design allows for certain architectural moments not to be lost in time, as Rutger Hauer’s replicant might say, like tears in rain.
For bookings, visit www.lasdunrestaurant.com
