Born in 1914, Lasdun completed his training at a time when modernism was being introduced into Britain from the European continent. He was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier, but never lost his allegiance to his first hero and model, the Baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736). The New Brutalist concrete masses of his University of East Anglia, for instance, owe much to Le Corbusier's late work, but also reflect British as well as international modern movements.

Lasdun's buildings make subtle reference to the way the natural world is organised, and he himself calls the horizontal platforms and overhanging levels of his buildings "strata", analogous to the stratification of geological rock forms in nature. "I began to be disillusioned with formulaic modernism," he says. "It was getting repetitive. Big housing blocks in parallel slabs were anti-life. I began to search for a richer mix."

Many critics believe that Lasdun has extended the modern movement, making full use of modern structural systems and machinery, but not celebrating technology for its own sake. Using the basic model of Le Corbusier's Domino skeleton of 1914, with its extending, cantilevered slabs, he has transformed it in building after building into an architecture of satisfying spatial sequences that reflect and respond to their surroundings. His primary aim is to create forms that serve life within the contexts of each site, whether in the city or the countryside.