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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
Lasdun's stacked concrete terraces, hated on sight and now hard to imagine the river without.
Concrete & brutalistYou can go insideFree
Also in Performance venues.
Denys Lasdun's building opened in 1976, thirteen years after Laurence Olivier founded the company at the Old Vic. He designed it as geology rather than architecture - horizontal strata of board-marked concrete, the grain of the shuttering left in the surface, with terraces layered outward so that the foyers spill towards the river and the fly towers rise behind. Opinion was split from the start: even Nikolaus Pevsner, no enemy of modern architecture, found the concrete overbearing, and the future Charles III later compared it to a nuclear power station. The foyers are free and open all day, which is the best way to understand it: the inside is one continuous public room on many levels.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.