The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Royal Festival Hall can hardly be called “unknown.” Opened in 1951,
it is one of London’s principal concert halls, and acoustically its best. It occupies
one of the most prominent sites in the city, on the South Bank of the
Thames, overlooking a bend in the river that allows it to be seen for about a
mile along the north shore, from Westminster to the Aldwych; and a few
years ago, an Evening Standard poll voted it London’s most popular building.
What, I imagine, appealed to most of the respondents to the poll was the
foyer, which is indeed one of the most remarkable interiors to be found anywhere
in Britain. Since the early 1980s, the foyer has been open all day and
every day, and has become host to bars, cafeterias, salad bars, book and music
stores, and art exhibitions; it is a popular venue. The foyer is a single, undivided
volume that fills the entire limits of the building; and standing in
it, beneath the auditorium that rests above on piloti, one is drawn in every
direction—up, down, and laterally—by the succession of stairs, landings,
and voids that fill the interior. Furthermore, in addition to this architectural
tour de force, it is one of the very few large public interiors that you can be
in without becoming the subject of some controlling interest; unlike the
typical public spaces of modernity—shopping malls, station concourses,
airports, art galleries—there is no requirement to become a consumer, no
obligation to follow a predetermined route through the building to some
11.1 | Royal Festival Hall, foyer. Drawing by Gordon Cullen.