School for art and design. Designed 1956-9, built 1960-63 in three phases; architect H T Cadbury-Brown, in collaboration with Sir Hugh Casson and Robert Goodden.

Despite alterations the building retains its powerful presence, fulfilling Cadbury-Brown’s aim of an architecture he describes as `lean and spare’. It also well reflects the building’s industrial function, and he suggests that Casson and Goodden left the design to him to ensure it had a `gritty’ feel. Like Cadbury-Brown’s own house and his lecture block at Essex University it has a meticulous geometry which sets it apart from the other, generally mundane, buildings of the time constructed for technical subjects. Ian Nairn described the RCA as having ‘the greatness and staure that so many of the physically great new buildings in London so conspicuously lack’.

Listed grade II

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