Vanbrugh has long been a source of inspiration for architects of very different persuasions. Among the most significant in the context of twentieth-century architecture were Alison and Peter Smithson and Robert Venturi. Although close in age, the Smithsons and Venturi advanced what are conventionally seen as diametrically opposing architectural philosophies in Postmodernism and Brutalism respectively, though both shied away from these respective monikers.

Where Brutalism constituted a doubling down on modernist tenets via its structural honesty, extreme truth to materials and, as was especially the case in the Smithsons’ work, progressive social programmes, Postmodernism embraced, to use Venturi’s characterisation, complexity and contradiction, rejecting modernist abstraction and embracing historical styles and aesthetics of the everyday.

Owen Hopkins will reconstruct what attracted such seemingly diverging architects to Vanbrugh’s architecture, how they saw it – and the different ways it shaped their own work.

The talk starts at 6.30pm.

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Photo Credit: 20th Century Architecture