London

The first thing Deyan Sudjic says as we sit down on the sofa in his Design Museum office to discuss his favourite iconic London buildings – being a design guru, it’s not just any old settee but a low-slung green Hella Jongerius – is that he loathes the word ‘icon’.

‘It’s a difficult word. I’ve written several bad-tempered newspaper articles about what a bad thing architectural icons are,’ the former Observer architecture critic says. ‘I think there is a lot to be said for good ordinary buildings,’ he adds.

His timing is surprising. The Design Museum has just embarked on a ‘Design Icon’ talk series in conjunction with Harrods, an organisation with rather a lot to gain from the notion of icons – particularly when it comes to chairs, tables, handbags and other modern products. Yet it’s apparent that Sudjic distrusts the current passion for celebrity that tends to nominate a building or bag – or person – at the expense of more worthy, but less showy, examples.

‘The current mania for icons comes from the Guggenheim building in Bilbao and the idea that one shocking building could transform an allegedly post-industrial basket case into a happy, shining place,’ he explains. ‘Of course there’s more to it than one eye-catching building. But it becomes a game of inflation, and every city wants an even better one: the volume is turned up and it becomes bombastic.’
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1. Sir Denys Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians
Sir Denys Lasdun was a quintessentially modernist London architect who built the National Theatre, the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury and seminal East End housing projects as well as this little known Grade I-listed structure. Sudjic studied the building as an architecture student; he’s loved it since its completion in 1964.

‘It’s in Regent’s Park in this extraordinary setting, which is rural but very urban. It’s got a regular structure but with eccentric shapes around it. The interior is great, too. They moved an oak-panelled room from their former headquarters in Trafalgar Square, so it’s sitting there in the midst of this [building] that is like something out of “2001: A Space Odyssey”.’

Sudjic is quietly passionate about the small but telling details: ‘The lecture theatre has all these dark bricks which look like an iceberg. I looked at it again when I saw [designs for] Zaha Hadid’s Cardiff opera house [which was never built], and I asked her about it and she said there are elements of the college she did adopt for her design.’

2. Heathrow Airport
At first, I assume that choosing Heathrow is a trailer for the Design Museum’s current Richard Rogers retrospective, but Sudjic’s interest lies not in Rogers’s controversial new Terminal 5, but in the older areas that were thrown up higgledy-piggledy after World War II.

‘In many ways Heathrow is a hideous, disgusting dump. Trying to get through security on a Sunday night in Terminal 3 is the third circle of Hell,’ he admits. ‘But you can find out a lot about London in the squalor. There’s something fascinating about looking at the layers of archaeology in what’s now Terminal 2 but was originally Terminal 1. You can find bits of travertine and sycamore wood finish in the main hall – a relic from when it was the most modern building in London. Layer upon layer of things were put on top of that. You can see the 1970s in fibreglass and bright plastic bits here and there. In some ways it’s the most authentic public space there is.’

Sudjic, who was born in Acton, is a big fan of this kind of organic development; he worries that prices in central London now preclude it. ‘You need areas where you can get on with things. Where could you start Hoxton now? Or Camden Market? There is nowhere left [in central London] that allows people to do new things without a huge investment in a very formal way,’ he points out. And this isn’t inevitable for a primary European city: ‘Berlin right now is selling itself as “poor but sexy”. There are not that many jobs, but you can get a very cheap apartment, with high ceilings, that you can turn into an informal café or an amateur-night art gallery,’ he says. ‘That’s a very interesting way to operate.’

Given our trophy buildings – 30 St Mary Axe (aka The Gherkin) and the Shard, which is currently under construction at London Bridge – but lack of cheap housing, it’s tempting to nominate ‘fur coat and no knickers’ as the equivalent London tagline. Sudjic isn’t so negative. ‘It’s a very fluid time. London is an amazing place; I can’t imagine anywhere I’d rather live. It’s thriving because it’s attractive to many different kinds of people. London has lots of grand gestures: the Thames has an amazing series of bridges; and there’s the incredible, mad, gothic Houses of Parliament; and the insane Tower Bridge.’ In the late nineteenth century, Sudjic points out, Napoleon III was so impressed by John Nash’s elegant villas and terraces in Regent’s Park that he and his planner, Baron Haussmann, shaped Paris to reflect it.

Spacecraft gothic: Richard Roger's Lloyds HQ is 'wonderfully made'

3. Lord Richard Rogers’s Lloyds headquarters
With its exterior defined by coils, elevator shafts and heating pipes, all clad in stainless steel, Rogers’s 1984 building on Lime Street, EC1, looks like the engine room of a giant spacecraft. It’s one of Sudjic’s favourites.

‘At a time when most organisations were disappearing to Milton Keynes or moving in to spec offices, the Lloyds Corporation invested in this wonderfully made, picturesque building,’ he says.

‘The way it puts its structure on the outside gives it the texture of a gothic building – in the same way a gothic arch shows its flying buttresses. I remember seeing a plan Rogers had taken from a medieval keep. It was the same idea that you could move the staircase and the lavatory towers outside to give it animation.’

Sudjic was installed as the Design Museum’s director following Alice Rawsthorne’s controversial departure. In the year and a half since his appointment, he has made his passion for architecture a museum staple, with an extremely successful Zaha Hadid exhibition last year (‘we had 650 visitors a day’) and now the Rogers retrospective. Architecture is certainly a more obvious tack for a design museum, but Sudjic is no traditionalist: the museum, he says, ‘is like a multiplex: you can do arthouse and blockbuster at the same time’. And he freely admits that he has yet to better Rawsthorne’s exhibition of Manolo Blahnik shoes, which achieved 700 visitors a day.

‘Alice did a great job of making the museum look stylish; she was great at catching the zeitgeist. She wasn’t quite so good at taking the trustees with her,’ he says graciously. He appears to have a better handle on the diplomacy necessary to the job, even though many of the ideas he’s considering, including a show about the impact of warfare and an exhibition of bags, are as off-piste as any of Rawsthorne’s.

4. Sir John Soane’s Museum
The neo-classical architect Sir John Soane was a madcap Georgian collector of art, furniture and architectural ornamentation who turned his house at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields into a successful museum in the 1800s. Has Sudjic tried to emulate Soane in any way?

‘I wish I could, but Sir John Soane’s Museum is one person’s voice and I don’t think the Design Museum should be just me. But I love the idea of an architect being so disappointed by his own children, one of whom actually wrote anonymous attacks on his father’s architecture in London newspapers, that he decided to spend their entire inheritance on making a fabulous house and museum.’

Originality and eccentricity are clearly important to Sudjic. ‘Designing something consciously to be a monument usually fails. Things become monuments because they’re accepted.’

‘Richard Rogers + Architects: From the House to the City’ runs until Aug 25 at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, SE1 (0870 833 9955/ www.designmuseum.org).
‘Design Icons’ lecture series is at Harrods until May 24 (020 7730 1234/www.harrods.com).