RIBA

Selected by

Neal Shasore, Head of School and CEO The London School of Architecture

Dr Neal Shasore is Head of School and Chief Executive Officer of the London School of Architecture. Neal graduated from the University of Oxford with a DPhil in Architectural History, an MA in History of Art and MSt in the History of Art and Visual Culture. He was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Liverpool, based in the school of architecture. Previously Neal was a Visiting Lecturer to the University of Cambridge’s architecture school and has held posts at RIBA and the University of Westminster. An architectural historian by training his research and writing has primarily focussed on architectural culture in Britain and the Empire in the first half of the twentieth century and this critical perspective informs his own pedagogy and practice. He is a Trustee of the Architectural Heritage Fund and the Twentieth Century (c20) Society.
Location

66, Portland Place, London W1
Architecture

George Grey Wornum 1932-34.

Grade II listed 1970

The Royal Institute of British Architects is a professional body for architects primarily in the United Kingdom, but also internationally, founded for the advancement of architecture under its royal charter granted in 1837, three supplemental charters and a new charter granted in 1971. The architect, George Grey Wornum’s submission, was chosen from over 3,600 entries, and the building was opened by King George V and Queen Mary.

The building is the best known work of Grey Wornum, whose career was interrupted by World War 1 where he lost his right eye, and subsequently wore a monacle to conceal it. He is portrayed in a bronze bust set in the wall near the entrance. The interiors were planned with his wife, artist and designer Miriam Gerstle.

Artwork features everywhere. Over the entrance of the Portland Stone building is Architectural Aspiration, a relief of a giant figure reaching for the sky, the work of Edward Bainbridge Copnall.

On either side of the entrance are two pillars with carved figures of the spirit of man and woman as creative forces of architecture, the work of James Woodford, who was also responsible for the huge bronze doors which depict the River Thames and notable London buildings. There are six engraved and sandblasted glass panels by Raymond McGrath in the doors leading to the outdoor terrace, depicting six great periods of architecture.

In the Florence Hall carved stone pillars of Perrycot limestone show ‘man and his buildings through the ages.’
Interesting facts

The galleried RIBA library with its specially designed elegantly curved bookcases hold one of the world’s best architectural book collections and is regularly open to the public. The curves of the bookcase in fact conceal radiators.
Resources

Best Buildings Britain by Matthew Freedman published by Luster

www.manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1930/riba

The exterior of RIBA in Portland Place ©Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections

66 Portland Place – the purpose-built headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) – was a project that had close links with the newly-established Building Centre in the early 1930s. As the Building Centre’s founders refurbished the former French Gallery at 158 New Bond Street, bank-rolled by the Gluckstein brothers who owned and managed Bovis, the Institute promoted its Empire-wide open competition for the design of its new headquarters.

The huge bronze doors of RIBA by sculptor James Woodford depict the River Thames and various notable London buildings. © Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections

But the connections were more profound still: the directors of the Centre included not only Grey Wornum, the architect eventually selected for the 66 Portland Place project, but also Robert Atkinson, one of the RIBA’s competition assessors, and Maurice Webb, who chaired the New Premises Committee. There were therefore clear links between the two projects: Portland Place used some of the new materials and technologies displayed in the Building Centre’s New Bond Street showrooms: Empire Timbers abounded, promoted by the Empire Marketing Board in a specially designed display case at the Centre, and the lighting programme at both buildings was coordinated by the architect Waldo Maitland, consultant to the Electric Lamp Manufacturers’ Association’s Lighting Service Bureau located on Savoy Hill.

‘The Sculptor’ by Bainbridge Copnall on the Weymouth Street elevation. © RIBA Collections

66 Portland Place was a project not only by architects for architects, it represented the triumph of a professional ideal, much contested since the 1890s Memorialists debate, but now all but settled through the Architects Registration Act (1931) which gave architects statutory project of title for the first time. Opened to mark the centenary of the Institute’s establishment in 1834, it was the last of the great professional palazzi, a typology inaugurated by John Belcher and Arthur Beresford Pite’s Institute of Chartered Accountants on Great Swan Alley.

One of the glass panels by Raymond McGrath representing the Roman period as one of the 6 great periods of architecture. © RIBA Collections

An ingeniously packed programme on a corner site, it presented a modernised professional bureaucracy and members’ facility: typologically somewhere between a town hall and a gentleman’s club. Strongly influenced by the Georgian tradition in contemporary architecture at that time, alongside the ‘Swedish Grace’ of Asplund and Tengbom and indeed the National Romanticism of Ragnar Ostberg in its decorative programme. The building mixed standardised elements and products, with idiosyncratic hand-crafted ornamentation in stone, bronze and plaster.’

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