Royal College of Physician's

We had another visit today for my Architecture in London class. This time it was to the Royal College of Physician's next to Regent's Park. This building is an extremely modernist building, unlike anything we've visited so far. It's incredible to look at the progression of the architecture that we looked at in the beginning of term (Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, etc.) to what we're studying now. I found the style to be pretty ugly, or what they call "brutalist architecture", but I'm thinking that I'll incorporate it into my final analytical paper for the course.

A characteristic of this architecture is its visual illusion of making things look unsupported. This architecture is all about function without aesthetics (or you could argue that the aesthetics are in the materials - but still subordinate to function). The architect, Denys Lasdun, originally did not want the columns on the exterior, but ended up needing them for support. Below you can see the staircase which actually reminded me of the one in Harry Potter bc they call it the "floating staircase". Check the color of the rugs...yuck.

This is one of six panels in the library (and actually there are only a handful of sets that exist in the world today). At at time where it was difficult to conduct dissections they actually varnished the insides of ex-convicts on these tablets to use as learning tools. Pretty creepy.