These are three highly feted and ground-breaking Modern British buildings. The extremely influential Leicester University Engineering Department Building, with its powerful contradictory geometry, established the worldwide reputation of James Stirling. The glass facade of Foster’s building for Willis Faber Dumas – a mirror by day and transparent by night – caused a sensation in 1974 and still commands attention. The ‘mechanical cathedral’ of Lloyd’s in the heart of the City of London, was a radical development in the 1980s and epitomizes Rogers’s concern with flexibility and technical imagery. By looking at the three key buildings in one volume the reader can chart the development of Modern British architecture and examine the distinctive approaches taken by the ‘big three’ exponents, as they were called at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1986.