Architecture in London

Our London collection includes 13 buildings across 6 architectural styles in the catalogue, with Brutalism as its dominant language — 8 of the city's entries are Brutalist, making it the most concentrated collection of the style in any single city.

The catalogue includes work by 14 architects, with Sir Denys Lasdun and Ernő Goldfinger each contributing defining towers and civic buildings. London's Brutalism was a social project: the Barbican Estate, Balfron and Trellick Towers, the Brunswick Centre — all were built to house people, not to impress them. The raw concrete was the honest material of a welfare state. That many of these buildings are now listed and gentrified is part of the story.

Beyond Brutalism, London's catalogue captures the International Style's arrival in England (the Penguin Pool, Cohen House), early Modernist experiments (the Isokon Flats, Royal College of Physicians), and adaptive reuse at its most ambitious (Tate Modern, where Herzog & de Meuron turned a decommissioned power station into a gallery).

Use the buildings in our London collection to compare architectural forms, materials and details. The style links above show the current catalogue coverage.

Brutalist

London's signature modern style, with 8 buildings. Raw board-marked concrete, massive sculptural volumes, and repetitive structural bays. The Barbican Estate is the most complete example — a self-contained city within the city, with residential towers, walkways, and cultural buildings all in béton brut. Goldfinger's Balfron and Trellick Towers use a distinctive service-tower-and-slab composition. Lasdun's Royal National Theatre stacks horizontal concrete strata like geological layers. Look for the texture of timber formwork imprinted in the concrete.

Modernist

Clean lines, open plans, and an emphasis on light. London's Modernist entries span from the 1930s (the Isokon Flats, with their streamlined balconies and access galleries) to the 1960s (the Royal College of Physicians, where Lasdun's cantilevered lecture theatre floats above the entrance). Look for expressed structure, horizontal window bands, and white or light-rendered surfaces.

International Style

A specific strand of early Modernism characterised by steel-frame construction, glass curtain walls, and an absence of ornament. The Penguin Pool at London Zoo (Lubetkin and Tecton) demonstrates the style at its most playful — interlocking concrete ramps as pure geometry. The Cohen House (Chermayeff and Mendelsohn) is more austere: white walls, horizontal windows, a flat roof — the European avant-garde transplanted to the English coast.

Adaptive Reuse

Buildings transformed from one purpose to another while preserving their industrial character. Tate Modern is the landmark example: Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's massive brick power station, with its single chimney stack, was gutted and reimagined by Herzog & de Meuron as a sequence of gallery spaces. Look for the contrast between the original industrial shell and the surgical contemporary insertions.