After studying at the AA in the 1930s where he was much influenced by EAA Rowse's committment to architecture as a social art and by Rowland Pierce's ideas regarding planning, Denys Lasdun worked with Wells Coates before joining Berthold Lubetkin's practice Tecton. Lasdun's own trajectory from the hothouse atmosphere of the evolving modernist movement in England to the post-war era extended the aesthetic and social concerns of modernism through a series of projects that, in London alone, included the Hallfield Estate, Paddington (built with Lindsay Drake); the Keeling House cluster block, Bethnal Green; the Royal College of Physicians, Regents Park; and the National Theatre on the South Bank.