The National Theatre on the South Bank is Denys Lasdun's most complex and debated work. Three auditoriums — the Olivier, the Lyttelton, and the Dorfman — are stacked and interlocked within a composition of cascading horizontal terraces that Lasdun called 'strata'. The building was designed to read as an extension of the Thames riverbank, its layers of concrete stepping up from the water's edge.
Prince Charles famously described it as 'a way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London'. The building was Grade II* listed in 1994. Its public terraces, open to all whether they have tickets or not, embody a particular ideal of the civic: a building that is genuinely used, inhabited, and worn. The concrete has accumulated four decades of weathering, and it looks better for it.