Berthold Lubetkin (1901–1990) was a Russian-born British architect who pioneered modernist design in Britain in the 1930s. Born in Tbilisi, then in the Russian Empire, he studied in Moscow under Constructivists including Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin, then in Berlin, Warsaw and Paris. He moved to London in 1931 and set up the practice Tecton, working closely with the engineer Ove Arup. His conviction that "nothing is too good for ordinary people" shaped his housing and health buildings, and he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1982.
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Tecton's first commission was the Gorilla House, London Zoo (1933). After the war, the Spa Green Estate in Finsbury (1949), whose foundation stone Aneurin Bevan laid, brought lifts, balconies, light from several sides and a roof terrace to working families. His last Finsbury scheme, Bevin Court (1954), has a red Constructivist staircase at its heart, under which he buried his memorial to Lenin. With Francis Skinner and Douglas Bailey he then designed estates in Bethnal Green, among them the Cranbrook Estate (1963), before giving up architecture to farm in Gloucestershire.
