Natalia Maximova

Growing up in the Soviet Union, I’ve always had an appreciation of both the limitations of concrete and its possibilities. New high-rise neighbourhoods were usually made from precast panels, often badly put together, with gaps in the walls.

My introduction to concrete was aged about six – I vividly remember moving into an apartment at the top of a nine-storey precast block, and my dad spending hours trying to put some shelves on the concrete wall. At the same time, public buildings and sculpture could be quite expressive and powerful.

I was 12 when I visited the Salaspils Memorial in Latvia, then still part of the Soviet Union, commemorating the victims of a Nazi concentration camp. It was the same material as the housing complexes we lived in, and its brutality and rough texture were accentuated by the rain. There was also beauty to these colossal figures – no sentimentality, just pure expression of suffering, raw pain and unbroken spirit.

When I first came to Britain on an architectural scholarship, there was no apparent love for concrete buildings and 1960s architecture held a strongly negative connotation. Many amazing buildings from that era were not celebrated enough, including the Roger Stevens Building, which I first discovered by accident on a visit to the University of Leeds. I was totally flabbergasted by its scale, aplomb and the freedom of the composition.

I think British architecture is in its comfort zone when it’s either organic and pretty, or austere and controlled. This is a rare building that sits in-between, with modernist rigour but also an amazing fluidity. Listed in 2010 as grade II*, it is currently undergoing a facade preservation project – a treatment it truly deserves. As I started working more closely with concrete (for the University of York’s Campus East Gateway, CQ 283, Summer 2023), I began to explore and appreciate the different techniques, and found myself seeking out new buildings. When I went to Lisbon last year, a colleague recommended the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Unmistakably brutalist and urban, it sits on a small plot crammed into the city grid, with overlapping levels and stairs linking two neighbouring streets. The degree of coordination and integration – of light, services, different angles and views – and the control and richness of details are incredible. It has this compressed energy that you feel you must obey. Interestingly, my children, who were 17 and 11, didn’t enjoy it at all! They felt it was gloomy and prescribed – that the building told you what to do and when to be quiet.

The same day, we visited the Gulbenkian Foundation, a modernist art complex set in its own gardens. The polarity was fascinating. From the same era, it is built using the same materials and similar techniques but to a very different effect. The spaces are generous and very democratic, and outdoors and indoors flow together seamlessly. You feel like you can occupy it any way you want. My children loved it.

Natalia Maximova is a partner at Sheppard Robson

Photos Robin McElvie, Alamy Stock Photo, Arcaid Images, Ludovic des Cognets; John Mendes