Owen Luder

Who is Owen Luder?

Owen Luder, CBE is a British architect who designed a number of notable and sometimes controversial buildings in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a former chairman of the Architects Registration Board and president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He established his own practice Owen Luder Partnership in 1957, and left in 1987 to form the consultancy Communication In Construction.

Owen Luder's designs included some of the most powerful and raw examples of Brutalist architecture, with massive bare concrete sculptural forms devoid of claddings or decoration - other than their inherent shapes. The British climate, with abundant rain and damp winters, is unkind to such unclad concrete buildings which rapidly become a shabby grey–brown colour and streaked with marks where rainwater has run down the façades. Poor maintenance has often exacerbated these problems.

Some of the Owen Luder Partnership's best known buildings are the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, Derwent Tower in Gateshead and Catford shopping centre in London, which is being considered for demolition. Trinity Square in Gateshead was another one of the practice's major schemes, demolition of which began in January 2009. Luder also designed the much-derided Southgate shopping centre in Bath, Somerset, which has recently been demolished to make way for a new multi-million pound development.