The Hayward at 40

Took a trip to the Southbank on Wednesday evening to hear a talk celebrating 40 years of the Hayward Gallery. On the panel were one of the building’s original architects, Dennis Crompton, artist Anthony Gormley and critic Alison Rawsthorn.

The Hayward Gallery image courtesy of Marc Cox

The Hayward isn’t London’s best loved building and is burdened with the label of being of the ‘brutalist’ school of architecture. But the more you learn about the building’s genesis and what the architects set out to achieve, the more interesting it becomes. It started as a 1950s urban planning challenge; everyday thousands of people arrived into Waterloo Station and had to make their way to the other side of the river. In between Waterloo Station and Waterloo Bridge was an area of old factories and the remnants of the Festival of Britain site - including the wonderfully named 'Dome of Discovery'. The brief to the architects was to create a building that acted as a concourse at the same height as the platforms at Waterloo Station to help carry people to the bridge and beyond.

The Mappin Terraces image courtesy of Malcolm Edwards

They were inspired by the Mappin Terraces at London Zoo and created this multilayered structure that people could access and travel through at different levels. This was the thinking behind the whole South Bank area - that it should be alive with people but for the first thirty years of the Hayward’s existence it was bereft of people and events and consequently didn’t work as a public space.

The area is now alive with stuff, currently there is a boating lake on the building’s roof as part of the Psycho Buildings  exhibition, an amazing United Visual Artists light installation twinkles nearby and Nokia's Skate Almighty  is in situ. The Hayward was designed not to be a passive art gallery but as a space to host events both inside and outside; the more that is going on around it the better it works as a building.

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