What is 66 Portland Place?
The building is the national home of British architecture. Since its opening it has housed RIBA's library, galleries, lecture theatre, bookshop, and administrative offices, as well as providing one of the most frequently used civic and professional event venues in central London. It is open to the public and — until its closure for refurbishment in June 2025 — contained the largest architectural library in Europe, with over four million items.
The building is not merely a container for these functions: it is itself an argument about what architecture is and what it can do. Everything about it — the choice of sculptor, the iconographic programme of the reliefs, the quality of the bronze doors, the grand staircase — was designed to demonstrate that architecture is a serious art practised by serious people. That ambition was shared between Wornum and his collaborators: his wife Miriam Wornum (1898–1989) was responsible for the building's interior colour scheme and painted murals in the library and the Lutyens Room; James Woodford produced the bronze entrance doors and the entrance column figures; Edward Bainbridge Copnall created the sculptural reliefs on the upper façade.
Facts panel
Purpose-built headquarters for the Royal Institute of British Architects, on the corner of Portland Place and Weymouth Street, Marylebone, London. Designed 1929–32, built 1932–34. Currently closed for major refurbishment.
- Architect: George Grey Wornum (1888–1957)
- Interior colour scheme and murals: Miriam Wornum (1898–1989), the architect's wife
- Sculptors: James Woodford (entrance doors and column figures); Edward Bainbridge Copnall (entrance and upper relief figures)
- Client: The Royal Institute of British Architects
- Competition: Announced 1929; 284 entries; Wornum's design selected
- Construction: 1932–1934 (four floors); two additional floors added in 1958 to Wornum's original plans
- Foundation stone: Laid 28 June 1933 by Thomas, Lord Howard de Walden
- Officially opened: 8 November 1934, by King George V and Queen Mary
- Address: 66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD
- Materials: Steel frame encased in concrete; Portland stone cladding; flat roof; bronze
- Architectural style: Swedish classical modernism blended with Art Deco and late neoclassical; sometimes called 'Swedish Grace'
- Listing: Grade II* (Historic England, listed 14 September 1970 — one of the first modern buildings to be listed)
- Current status (March 2026): Closed since June 2025 for the £85 million 'House of Architecture' refurbishment by Benedetti Architects, with Purcell as executive architect; due to reopen 2028
Architect: George Grey Wornum
George Grey Wornum (1888–1957) was educated at Bradfield College and the Slade School of Art before training in architecture under his uncle, Ralph Selden Wornum. He was badly wounded during the First World War — losing his right eye — but this had no evident effect on his subsequent career. He was President of the Architectural Association in 1930 and was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 1952, the profession's highest honour. He died in New York in June 1957 and was named CBE in the Birthday Honours published two days after his death.
The RIBA building is the work for which he is principally known, and it was a genuinely difficult brief: to design the headquarters of British architecture's own professional body, for a competition audience composed entirely of architects. Wornum's response was pragmatic and intelligent. He did not attempt an ideological statement of modernist faith, nor did he retreat into historicism. Instead he drew from several sources — Swedish classicism, the Arts and Crafts tradition, and the streamlined modernity then associated with ocean liners and American commercial architecture — and combined them into a composition that is coherent without being doctrinaire.
Wornum's wife, the American-born designer Miriam Wornum, was a full collaborator on the building's interior. She painted the murals for the library and Lutyens Room and determined the interior colour scheme — a contribution long underacknowledged in the official record, in a pattern familiar from other interwar buildings where women's creative work was absorbed into a single male attribution.
Architectural character and design approach
The Portland Place façade is an austere, symmetrical rectangle of pale stone, dominated by the great central window through which the second floor crosses — a bold gesture that unifies the composition vertically and provides the building with its most distinctive feature from the street. On either side of the entrance stand tall columns carrying Woodford's bronze figures representing the creative spirit of man and woman in architecture. The main entrance doors — cast bronze, each weighing one and a half tonnes — carry relief scenes designed by Woodford depicting the River Thames alongside London's landmarks: the Guildhall, the Houses of Parliament, St Paul's Cathedral. Three of the children depicted on the right-hand door are Wornum's own; Woodford placed his wife and child on the left. Near the base of the right-hand door, a figure of Mercury — Roman god of messages — decorates the letterbox.
On the Weymouth Street elevation, Bainbridge Copnall's bas-relief figures occupy the fourth-floor frieze: an Artisan, a Painter, an Architect (represented as Christopher Wren), a Sculptor (shown with hammer and chisel), and a Mechanic. Above the main entrance, his central figure of Architectural Aspiration presides over the composition.
Inside, the building contains a series of spaces that vary markedly in scale and formality, from the grand central staircase to the double-height reading room of the library. The entrance hall is lined with Perrycot stone, incised with the names of RIBA's former presidents, secretaries and recipients of the Royal Gold Medal. The floor of the Florence Memorial Hall is laid in Indian teak. The library — described at the time as 'the finest architectural library in existence' — was universally praised from the outset. It is one of the building's most successful spaces and, like the building itself, manages to be both monumental and usable.
The critical reception in 1934 was divided. The Observer called the design a simple monumental idea that every mind could grasp. The Manchester Guardian praised Wornum as an informed craftsman working with chaste joyfulness. The Scotsman saw speed and ocean-liner references. The New Statesman was not persuaded, judging the result safe rather than great. The RIBA Journal itself — with admirable self-awareness — noted it had suspended its usual modesty in order to reproduce three pages of press notices. The building was, in short, the kind of work that intelligent people disagree about — which is usually a reliable sign that something real is happening in it.
The sculpture programme
The iconographic programme at 66 Portland Place is unusually developed for a British building of the period and rewards close attention.
Woodford's bronze entrance doors are among the finest examples of architectural metalwork produced in Britain in the twentieth century. The scale — each door weighing one and a half tonnes — gives them a physical presence that changes the experience of entering the building, slowing you down and preparing you for what lies beyond. The river-and-city programme on their surface is a reminder that architecture is not an abstract discipline: it is the making of actual places in actual cities.
Copnall's frieze figures on the Weymouth Street elevation address a different question: what does an architect actually do? The five trades — painting, sculpture, engineering, craft, architecture — represent the collaborative nature of building, in a gesture that is modest and generative. The Architect is shown not as a heroic individual but as one skilled person among several.
Wornum's own contribution to the building's decorative programme was typically oblique: his signature monocle appears in decorative motifs within the interior — a private joke embedded in the fabric of his most public building.
