The Hayward Gallery is "a dirty, gnarled bunker of a building". It is "mean and fierce". It had, when built, "no dignified disabled access". And this from one of its friends, the Twentieth Century Society, whose job is to speak up for buildings like the Hayward.

Unlike the Royal Festival Hall, which won its place as a loved landmark relatively easily, the Hayward Gallery is still, 40 years after construction, hard for most people to like.

Yet it was designed as a populist building, with terraces open to events and its freeform architecture the opposite of institutional. It would be as close as anyone got to a democratic, cultural palace for the people; the tragedy was the people were too put off by the aggressive concrete to notice.

Its design is credited to "LCC/ GLC Special Works Group, N.W. Engleback in charge, succeeded by E.J. Blyth", wonderfully unlike the current culture of celebrity architects.

Now, perhaps, its time has come. Its directors have learned you can do great things with it, if you avoid traditional shows of framed pictures on walls. Psycho Buildings, which populates the terraces with boating ponds and translucent domes, at last uses them as the designers intended. Antony Gormley's Blind Light exploited the building's many levels, populating them with figures and his vapour-filled room.

Hostility to the Hayward led to attempts to smother it, first with Terry Farrell's plan to wrap it in post-modern retail architecture, then with a giant glass roof proposed by Richard Rogers. Both plans foundered.

In 2003, architects Haworth Tompkins and artist Dan Graham made a more subtle change: a glassy new entrance pavilion. This, surely, is the way to go. Tweak it, fix its failings, but keep it as an extraordinary building of a kind which will never be built again.

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