STRUCTURAL DESIGN FOR ARCHITECTURE

Structural Design for Architecture

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Fig. 4.11 National Theatre of Great Britain, London,

1967-73, Denys Lasdun, architect. This building is a very

prominent example of the type of Corbusier-inspired

architecture which was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s

in which the expressive possibilities of roughly textured

exposed reinforced concrete were explored. (Photo: Densy

Lasdun Peter Softley and Associates).

1950s. Another British example was the

Economist Building, again in London (1964),

by Alison and Peter Smithson. Frequently, the

textures involved were deliberately contrived to

be extremely rough and thus was a new and

savage element introduced into the otherwise

smooth and refined vocabulary of architectural

Modernism.

The architectural language developed by Le

Corbusier, Gropius, Lubetkin, Williams and

others in the 1920s and 1930s, and extended in

the 1940s and 1950s by Le Corbusier, Alison

and Peter Smithson and others, was destined

to be imitated in almost every city in the world.

In virtually all of the buildings involved,

whether the seminal buildings in which the

language was evolved or the many imitations,

the relationship between the structure and the

architecture fell into the category of 'structure

accepted'. The properties and requirements of

the reinforced concrete structure were, in other

words, given an important role in influencing

the visual language of the architecture.

Not all of the great reinforced concrete

buildings of the twentieth century fall into the

category described above, however. Le

Corbusier himself did occasionally make full

and exaggerated use of the expressive possibil-

ities of reinforced concrete; perhaps the most

famous example of this occurred at the chapel

at Ronchamp (Fig. 4.12). Here the relationship

between the structure and the architecture was

one of 'structure ignored'.^5 Structural consider-

ations played little part in the evolution of the

form of the building. The structural system

which was adopted was nevertheless relatively

straightforward, largely due to the excellent

structural properties of reinforced concrete.

The distinctively shaped roof is nothing more

than a beam/column framework with a one-

way-spanning slab. In this case the mouldabil-

ity of the concrete and the structural continuity

it offered were used to produce a slab with

double curvature to form the remarkable

canopy. The beams which support this were

5 See Section 2.2.