Institute of Education, London
Built 1968-73 (SOAS) and 1970-76 (Institute of Education)
Designed by Denys Lasdun & Partners
They wouldn’t build something like the Institute of Education today. The accountants slide rule would rule it out. Budgets don’t allow for such imagination. Now every parcel of land has to profit from your presence.
The building is too bold for them. There’s a wide open area at the front and spare air around each stepped layer. Such generosity of space is a vacuum for the bean counters.
The Grade II*listed Institute for Education was built for The University of London between 1970-76 in Bloomsbury. Half a century earlier the area was home to the influential Bloomsbury Group. It still has an air of intellectual bohemianism where brutalist buildings can sit happily alongside Georgian squares.
The architects were Denys Lasdun & Partners. They also designed the nearby Royal College of Physicians (1960-64) and The National Theatre (1967-76).
It doesn’t have a flat, uniform facade of glass edged by steel so beloved by today’s accountants. It asks more of you than that. The levels are stepped, the materials are varied.
Look at it again and you’ll see something you hadn’t noticed before. A small detail, an oversized staircase, a contrasting texture.
Something to make you think a little. An education in awareness.
From the street, the building is monumental. It spans the length of Bedford Way (the equivalent of three rugby pitches). Perhaps a tad longer than had been hoped… the Institute’s Secretary Willis Dixon wrote: “We did not want long corridors, in which if you lie on the floor you can detect the curvature of the earth”.
Its largesse celebrated the expansion of higher education as grants made university more accessible to a wider range of people. No longer was private schooling a pre-requisite.
Opposite the Institute sits the perfect companion - an extension to the School of Oriental and African Studies. Also designed by Lasdun and completed in 1970.
