The epithet “young architect” is habitually applied to any architect under the age of 50. Few practitioners get a break before they are middle aged. Rodney Gordon was one of those who did. He was still in his twenties when he designed the first major building of his astonishing and truncated oeuvre. By the time his exact contemporary Richard Rogers achieved fame at the age of 38 by winning the competition for the Pompidou Centre in 1971, Gordon’s career was waning fast.

It was a career unlike any other in the past half-century of English architecture: it happened the wrong way round. He designed nothing less than than a handful of masterpieces — then it was virtual silence. And his art has been treated with a contemptuous shoddiness commensurate only with its brilliance.

That, however, is hardly surprising, given that Gordon was a Brutalist, probably the greatest (as well as unquestionably the youngest) of the English Brutalists and thus a ready target for indolent bien-pensants whose antipathy to the architecture of the 1960s is as drearily predictable, as dismally unseeing, as was their parents’ and grandparents’ to that of the 1860s. These people fail to differentiate between the many strains of Modernism and, more importantly, between what was good and what bad. Nor, in their arrogance, do they realise that tastes change. Today Brutalism is admired by a new generation of aesthetes as opposed to the clichéd, knee-jerk calumnisation of “concrete monstrosity”, as John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster were to “Victorian monstrosity”.

The word Brutalism was coined by the architectural theorist Reyner Banham. It is a bilingual pun on the French béton brut (raw concrete) and art brut (Dubuffet’s word for outsider art) and the all too plain English word brutal. If only Professor Banham had failed to commit it to paper and had dreamt up a less loaded term, the fate of buildings in this idiom might have been happier, for their opponents, apprised only of the English component, would not have had the ammunition of what seems like a nomenclatural admission of culpable aggression.

Multimedia

• Rodney Gordon's buildings

Related Internet Links

• Risky Buildings

• Sarah J. Duncan's gallery of brutalist architecture

• The Twentieth Century Society

Related Links

• Lives remembered: Ken Campbell, David Hammond and Rodney Gordon

On the other hand they might still have abhorred it, for Brutalism committed the grossest of sins in English eyes. It abjured the picturesque in favour of the sublime. It scorned prettiness. “It put on,” as John Vanbrugh, a brutalist avant la lettre, had it, “a masculine show”. A show which did not preclude a strangely butch delicacy, a steely effeminacy. Gordon might have worked in concrete but he made it sing. His buildings were articulated rather than monolithic. More than any other English Brutalist he had looked at Constructivism. Gordon’s professed aim was to create an architecture that was “raw, dramatic, sculptural”. At the Tricorn in Portsmouth and Trinity Square in Gateshead he succeeded on a vast scale, unparalleled in Europe. These buildings were indeed extraordinarily sculptural, their silhouettes were audacious and poetic, jagged and rhetorical. They were thrilling structures that seem to be forces of nature, like fortresses in Castille which grow from the earth.

But they were shopping centres with car parks, mere shopping centres with car parks. The Derwent Tower (aka the Dunston Rocket), also in Gateshead, was council housing, mere council housing. Gordon was an artist who believed that the everyday should be touched by the exceptional, that usually banal building types ought to be as well made as cathedrals and so rendered rather less banal. But there exists to this day a preposterous architectural hierarchy which has nothing to do with the quality of the building and everything to do with its use. In the 1960s new university buildings, post-Vatican II churches, and theatres were respectable commissions. Commercial buildings and speculative developments were not.

Gordon possessed every architectural gift save those that matter most: he was no businessman and was a poor self-publicist. Hence his difficult partnership with Owen Luder — “a businessman,” in the words of a former employee, “who happened to have architectural qualifications”. Luder had a talent for architectural politics: he was twice president of the RIBA and even considered offering himself as a parliamentary candidate; regrettably he could not decide which party deserved him.

Gordon and Luder needed each other as much as they disliked each other. Gordon acknowledged that he was reliant on Luder's persuasive salesmanship and tireless schmoozing to get the commissions that enabled him to design with something close to carte blanche. He later wrote, gleefully biting the hand that fed: “If it meant selling my grandmother or working for Owen Luder, provided I was free to implement my ideas, I would do it . . . and without a second thought I did.”

Luder, five years Gordon’s senior, was a hard-nosed, industrious grafter from the Old Kent Road who, with great determination, had worked his way through the Brixton School of Building and the Regent Street Poly: he knew that the process of architecture was a matter of committees and compromises, budgets and restraints, of horse trading and connecting well, of tactfully balancing the conflicting interests of planners and clients. Rodney Gordon could hardly have been more different. He was exotic, convinced of his brilliance, feckless, charming, impatient, tirelessly hedonistic, uncompromising. And he considered architecture an art.

He was born in Wanstead, East London, in 1933 to non-observant Jewish parents. (He too was secular but was a determined, sometimes belligerent champion of Israel.) His father was Polish-Russian, his mother Chilean. They were well off. They moved to High Wycombe and then, in 1945, to Chelsea. They spent a lot of time at the races.

Their only son was academically precocious and went up to University College Hospital Medical School at 16 in 1949. Two years later, inspired by the Festival of Britain, he enrolled at the Hammersmith School of Building, where he was taught by the émigré German modernist Arthur Korn, who had been in partnership with Erich Mendelsohn. Korn captivated Gordon and encouraged him to apply to the Architectural Association, then, as now, a hot house.

Gordon graduated from the AA in 1957 and went to work for the London County Council architects department, a sort of de facto postgraduate school through which scores of subsequently celebrated architects had passed. It was during this period that he designed the now listed Michael Faraday Memorial at Elephant and Castle, an ingenious cloak over an electricity sub-station which has mystified millions of passers-by.