The two auditoriums were designed by a team led by Hubert Bennett, head of the architects department of the Greater London Council, with Jack Whittle, F.G. West and Geoffrey Horsefall.

The design of the QEH was intended to show to a high degree the separate masses and elements of the building, to avoid competing with the scale and presence of the RFH.

The focus is primarily on the internal spaces, which as originally designed had very limited fenestration except for the (deeply inset) sweep along the river frontage of the foyer building.

The original arrangements provided for circulation above and below the foyer (no longer allowed for security reasons, although the roof terrace has been opened for the Summer of Fun festival in 2011), right around the sides and rear of the two auditoriums, and also a bridge link to the Hayward Gallery.

A notable feature of the QEH is the interior of the foyer building, with its intimate scale and subtle use of materials, and the terrace overlooking Queen's Walk.

A crude disabled ramp, constructed of breeze blocks and bricks, has been added to the walkway between the QEH entrance and the Hayward Gallery.

The north-west facade, by Waterloo Bridge, although stained by pollution and rainwater, is a good example of the massive concrete forms popular in 1960s brutalist architecture in Britain.

The walkway area below this feature is on the roof of a utility building, and a branch of the restaurant chain Wahaca has been installed in a set of containers there, in 2012.

The acoustical properties of the Hall when examined in 1968 by music critics and engineers following a period of testing, trials and adjustment, were found to be of "general excellence" in the three key areas of: a) Reverberation Time, which in this Hall is mainly adjusted by opening and closing cavities in the vertical wood panels on both sides, b) Tone and Definition, by allowing diffusion with minimum use of deflectors over the seating area rather than the platform, and finally c) 'Singing' Tone produced here as in all excellent halls by a substantial height of the auditorium which, in the QEH's case, although the rear stalls are steeply raked, the ceiling is 25 feet (7.6 m) above the highest seats to the ceiling.

109 No 1499 Jan. 1968) There have inevitably been many alterations and adaptation of the Hall, particularly in recent years, involving increasing the size of the platform and rigging extra specialised lighting arrays which allow the staging of dance and comedy productions.

Although this informal activity, social and arts scene is a distinctive feature of the Southbank Centre site, it was proposed that the area would be redeveloped.

This was opposed by the Long Live Southbank Campaign which gained the support of Mayor Boris Johnson in early 2014, leading to the suspension of the Festival Wing proposals.

[6] The structure, designed by architect David Kohn[7] is described as "a one-bedroom installation"[6] and is shaped to appear like a boat perched on top of a building.

The whole 1960s complex including the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery, underwent complete internal refurbishment under the banner "Let the Light In" from 2015 to 2018, to designs by the architecture practice Feilden Clegg Bradley.