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The Royal Festival Hall, Alvar Aalto and the interior landscape

The foyer of the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank is an incredible achievement. Within a relatively normative, symmetrical parti, the experienced character is that of a landscape, with all the freedom of movement, variety of prospect, and most extraordinarily, the lack of sense of enclosure that the word implies. And yet it is an environmentally controlled space, an interior, with no external prospect (the view to the river is buffered, removed from immediacy at foyer level).

This character seems to me one of the few real contributions of the modern movement to architectural language (the free plan as Corbusier had it). And yet it is virtually never attempted, and still less often successful.

Of course, the size of the RFH helps, but I don't believe that's the root of its success. I wish I could say how to do it, still more set it down as a coherent pattern, but as yet I can't.

I believe that I can also see this character in the work of other architects:

• Alvar Aalto(although I've never visited any of his buildings)
• Frank Lloyd Wright in the better Oak Park period houses
• Gunter Behnisch' 1980's work - although there is little calmness here

I do seem to have achieved a domestic scale version of this feeling in two projects, and will strive to do it more consciously in future projects, where relevant.