THE NATIONAL GALLERY 095
the first of what were to become repeatedly misconceived competitions. Te designer of any addition to the building had to take into account the site’s peculiarities and, of course, its neighbours. Indeed, the trustees of the gallery, in their original brief, specifically recommended that the height, scale, massing and finish of its neighbours be respected. Trafalgar Square is no masterpiece of urbanism. Te southern side is a muddle. On the north, there is Canada House with chaste Greek Ionic porticos; the multi-columned and pilastered National Gallery; St. Martin-in-the- Fields with its spire-topped portico; and
South Africa House, with an engaged portico. As the late Hugh Honour said, ‘the site for the extension has columns to the right of it, columns to the left of it, and the biggest column of all in the centre of the square’. From a British viewpoint classical architecture has never lost the association with power and dominion that it had from the very beginning: monumentality was a good thing.
An exercise in commercial real estate Te worst aspect of all this was not the design but its brief – embracing Tatcherite love of private enterprise, the proposed building
was to cost the taxpayer nothing. It was to be financed by a real-estate developer who would have the right to lease the lower floors as shops and offices. It was a commercial project with an art gallery on top and no fewer than 79 companies made a submission. Tey all had architectural teams, even Reuben Seifert was party to one entry, the man who singlehandedly had changed the urban skyline with some notorious office buildings and been responsible for more projects in London than Christopher Wren. Te Colonel, as he was universally referred to, did not make the shortlist. Seven firms did: Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK); Richard Sheppard, Robson and Partners; Covell Matthews Wheatley; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; Raymond Spratley Partnership; Arup Associates; and Richard Rogers. Te public was asked to vote. No winner was announced, but ABK was asked to develop its project – another mistake. In normal circumstances ABK would have been appointed and the design developed in conjunction with the client. Instead of which the architects added a tower borrowed from Richard Rogers’ entry, resubmitted their proposal, and all hell broke loose. In retrospect, the firm’s original scheme looks as though it would have met the conditions of the brief that Selldorf has had to address. Not the revised ABK scheme with the tower derided by the then-Prince of Wales, but its original entry. Classical in proportion and style, sympathetic to the existing building, ABK not only answered the original brief but may well have anticipated and solved the problems that later arose. As for that final solution, it was delivered by the shortlisted Sheppard Robson and worth mentioning in passing that Williams Mullins, the firm’s senior partner, and responsible for its competition entry – a highly unexpected proposal from such a conventional and traditional practice. Respectful but forceful, the dark, sleek merchant banker’s suit that it proposed was quite a shock, an elegant and stylish unpretentious foil to Wilkins building, it was both entirely modern, and subservient to the old. Tey were almost certainly appointed executive architects due to an interior scheme for the galleries with subtle renaissance references.
Peter Ahrends told Mullins that the whole sorry saga was nearly the death of him, and the end of his firm, even if ABK did win the project to design the new British embassy in Moscow, possibly an opportunity for public redemption and to connect with Richard Burton’s Russian roots – he may have appeared the perfect English gentleman, but in fact his mother was Russian, Vera Poliakoff, who acted under the stage name Vera Lindsay.
Sometimes history goes backwards, or what might have been – the aftermath So. ABK’s design received the trustees’ approval, whereupon the Prince of Wales
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