One Christmas, sometime in the 1950s, RCP architect Sir Denys Lasdun sent a hand-drawn Christmas card to his colleagues at the architecture practice Fry Drew Drake and Lasdun. A steaming plum pudding and strands of holly adorn the façade of a classical temple, whose columns are none other than Lasdun’s partners Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, Lindsay Drake, and Lasdun himself, standing upside down and balancing the temple’s pediment on their feet.
The temple that Lasdun so delightfully depicted is actually the 5th century BC Erechtheion temple on the Acropolis at Athens, Greece. The Erechtheion’s so-called Porch of the Caryatids features six sculpted female figures serving as architectural supports in place of columns. Lasdun has simply updated and inverted the sculpted figures.
Perhaps there are hidden messages here. Did Lasdun consider himself and his partners as the strong, eternal and necessary elements of modern architecture? Is this a reference to the fact that although Lasdun and his partners collaborated with modernist architects including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Berthold Lubetkin, their educations were strongly grounded in the traditions of classical architecture?
Lasdun’s classical roots are evident in his later RCP building, which opened in 1964. The three thin columns, or piloti, at the front of the building are a reference to classical architecture, helping Lasdun’s modernist masterpiece blend a little more with the neo-classical 1820s John Nash terraces it nestles amongst. Just as Lasdun upends his poor colleagues in the drawing, he similarly inverted traditional classicism in his buildings.
Alternative columns are also the main feature in a hand-drawn Christmas card that Lasdun himself received in 1959. This card depicts the RCP building, with two giant Christmas baubles supporting the overhanging roof of the Dorchester Library. Inside the card is the inscription ‘…99 Cough. Merry Christmas from the Medical Orderlies!’
Ahem. It was well known that the appearance of the three piloti at the front of the RCP building caused Lasdun considerable indecision during the design process of the RCP building. Lasdun did not know how the RCP’s park-facing entrance should look, only that substantial support was needed for the superstructure of the cantilevered Dorchester Library above. Perhaps the medical orderlies were giving Lasdun some inspiration, although a more anatomical joke was clearly intended.
Merry Christmas all!
Sarah Backhouse, exhibition coordinator
'The anatomy of a building: Denys Lasdun and the Royal College of Physicians’ 8 September 2014 – 13 February 2015
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