Sir Leslie Martin (1908–2000) was an English architect, a leading advocate of the International Style, whose work was especially influenced by Alvar Aalto. Born in Manchester, he trained at Manchester University. After the war he joined the London County Council, became its chief architect in 1953 and used the post to promote younger architects such as James Stirling and Alison and Peter Smithson. From 1956 he headed the architecture school at Cambridge, where with Colin St John Wilson he designed Harvey Court, one of the most important examples of brick brutalism. He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1973.
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For the Royal Festival Hall in London (1951), the main building of the Festival of Britain, he led the design team under Robert Matthew; his 1948 sketch shows the concert hall as an "egg in a box", a raised auditorium wrapped in foyers. He later designed the extension to Kettle's Yard in Cambridge (1970), a gallery for works by Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and others. The Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon (1983) was added that year to the Gulbenkian Foundation's park as its modern art centre.
