Sir Denys Lasdun did three important things in his life. The first was to develop a highly original, intensely personal, language of architecture. The second was to defend his buildings vigorously when they fell from fashion, never giving up. And the third was to live long enough to see them, and himself, return to favour. When he died at 86, just over a week ago, Lasdun was a hero to a new generation. True, plenty of people still hate his buildings: he certainly did not court popularity. He can be hard work. But Lasdun's output, like that of his equally awkward Baroque hero Nicholas Hawksmoor, will last.
Just a couple of weeks before he died, yet another Lasdun building was listed: his magisterial Institutes of Education and Law complex for University College London in Bedford Way, Bloomsbury, designed in the late 1960s. Like so much of his work, this was deeply controversial when built, seen by many as an alien intrusion into a genteel Georgian and early Victorian area. It takes no prisoners. It is a megastructure. Even Lasdun's most ardent admirers start to make excuses when it is mentioned. Yet I have always found it devilishly good, a sequence of great, pure forms, a contrapuntal rhythm of horizontals and verticals - and of course, like all Lasdun buildings, it plays a sophisticated game of solid and void, light and dark. Like most of his work, it has something of the character of a geological outcrop. It is also undoubtedly daunting at street level. It doesn't exactly embrace you as you walk by.
It joins a clutch of other buildings, all now listed, which form one of the best portfolios of heroic modernism anywhere. There's the 1959 Royal College of Physicians in Regent's Park, arguably his best work; the Royal National Theatre (1967-76)- once derided, now admired by the cognoscenti and gradually winning public acceptance; the 1951 Hallfield School in Paddington, much influenced by his old master Berthold Lubetkin but adopting a freer, more organic, form; and a 1958 apartment block in St. James', overlooking Green Park. Balancing this palazzo for the wealthy are two related 1950s social housing blocks in east London, radical designs even by today's standards. There is some pre-war work too: a pioneering modern artist's house in London dating from 1937, and an almost conventional 1934 house in Surrey that Lasdun designed as a precocious 20-year-old student.
To have so many projects listed as architecturally and historically important in one's own lifetime is extraordinary - particularly when you consider what a lonely figure Lasdun seemed during the post-modern period of the 1980s. He was bruised then, but he fought his way back. One significant project was demolished - his Peter Robinson store in the Strand, which later became New South Wales House. It was by no means his best, and it showed scant respect for the Adam building of the Royal Society of Arts behind - but when you see the illiterate and ugly block that has taken its place, you want to go out and strangle whatever Westminster city planner was responsible for allowing it. But that was a rare defeat. Given that Lasdun was still designing extensions and alterations to some of his projects up to the last, that makes an active creative career spanning 67 years.
