The Hayward Gallery occupies the upper level of the Southbank Centre complex, adjacent to the Royal Festival Hall. Designed by the Greater London Council's architects' department and completed in 1968, it was from the beginning the most aggressively brutalist of the South Bank buildings — a sequence of low, heavy, top-lit gallery spaces connected by ramps and stairs and crowned by a series of pyramidal roof lights and the famous neon sculpture towers on the terrace.
The gallery's exterior geometry — angular, interlocking, absolutely indifferent to conventional beauty — made it a lightning rod for anti-brutalist criticism. But inside, the sequence of interlocking spaces, the natural light filtering through concrete coffering, and the material honesty of the construction create one of the most architecturally interesting gallery environments in London.