098 THE NATIONAL GALLERY
‘well-loved friend’ is a reminder that love is proverbially blind. Tey provided a most ingenious and well-judged complement to Wilkins’s building, hinting, almost, that he had also played sophisticated games with classical elements. Te Venturi pilasters are, of course, decoratively symbolic and not even fictionally structural like those on the old building.
It did not work – the aftermath It has been loved and loathed in equal measures ever since. In 2015 the American Institute of Architects named Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown as the 2016 AIA Gold Medal laureates, giving them the joint recognition the Pritzker Prize organisers refused. Ten, three years later, praised for balancing both old and new aesthetics, and ‘a play on Italian Mannerism [that] demonstrates the duo’s sophisticated but ironic acknowledgement of modern conditions while thoroughly exploring classical architecture’s conventions’, the AIA bestowed its 25-Year Award to the Sainsbury Wing, calling it a ‘decorated shed’ and a building ‘that has stood the test of time for 25–35 years and continues to set standards of excellence for its architectural design and significance’.
Te legacy of all the arguments about the extension was to the architects a story of problems, interference and compromise. Tey had made a valiant attempt to come to terms with the overlaying of classical bombast, imperial grandeur and intricate medieval street plans, the convergence of the entertainment hub around Leicester Square and its representational symbol, Trafalgar Square. Teir pseudo-classical façade, responded to the original building whilst accepting that ‘Palladio and Modernism fight it out on the main façade’, as Scott Brown wrote at the time, ‘and must respect our era’s discomfort with unalloyed monumentality’. Tis was an architecturally literate, witty, reflective and subtle design, albeit not without its problems – some of which were forced on the architects.
However, all that stuff that Scott Brown came out with about driving around Italy in a Morgan three-wheeler discovering the mannerist art of the late renaissance, and staying with friends living in the basement of what had been their palace; how ‘the multipurpose spaces down below, and the scale between that and the house above worked beautifully. Tat was what we were trying to do with the National Gallery. And it worked,’ she said. It did not work, and never has. Te major Veronese exhibition in 2015 and the Lucian Freud show in 2022 certainly benefited where others did not by being put on upstairs in real galleries – original ones in the 19th century building. Te suspended walkway linking the Sainsbury Wing to the main building was conceived as a Bridge of Sighs. Come on! As for that lift door facing the grand staircase, ‘Tere was meant to be a bas
relief there,’ Scott Brown lamented wistfully. It is an in-between building, neither one thing nor the other. Not a bravura resolution of conflicting demands, as some would have it, nor a foil to the original. Most members of the architectural profession, especially those who competed unsuccessfully for the commission, had wanted an unornamented Modern-style building. Te others, mainly journalists, plus the populist ‘building beautiful’ brigade, wanted a classicism that was frankly revivalist – not Post-Modern – complaining that Venturi had not gone the whole hog. Te general view had not moved on since Evelyn Waugh’s account of 1928 in Decline and Fall of the architect Otto Friedrich Silenus – ‘Te problem of architecture as I see it,’ he told a journalist who had come to report on his surprising creation of ferro-concrete and aluminum, ‘is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from all consideration of form.’
Calls to protect pastiche: the third competition
Te question inevitably arose, did it work? Was a façade that echoed the original such a good idea? Was Venturi’s work really a bravura resolution of conflicting demands? Te building was heavily criticised when it was first opened. It’s easy to criticise. However, Margaret Tatcher (who along with Prince Charles was seen by David Chipperfield as ‘one of the twin towers of negativity towards the architectural profession’) once said, ‘Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides’ – a metaphor apt for the manner in which the Sainsbury Wing was received upon completion. Te totalitarian viewpoint of both the traditionalists and the Neo- Modernists rejected Venturi Scott Brown’s design as compromised and untrue to tradition on the one hand, and as pastiche ‘picturesque mediocre slime’ on the other. A fine building had nevertheless somehow emerged only to make clear how the vagaries of fashion inhabit architectural closets as much as they do any other.
Just what was the substance of Post- Modernism was never really came into it. The superficial, glitzy and glib – deficiencies that were largely but not solely attributable to the meretricious quality of work produced during the 1970s and 1980s was what made the Sainsbury Wing appear so outstanding. Post-Modernism was not a movement but merely a style – or, perhaps even more accurately, a ‘look’ – generally characterised by historicising motifs (often quotations from well-known architectural landmarks) recombined in collage-like form. Te wing has been dubbed one of the few great mature fruitions of Post-Modernism, and in 2018 was surprisingly awarded a Grade I listing for historic buildings, a decision that has reverberated. If you can change this
‘The question inevitably arose, did it work? Was a façade that echoed the original such a good idea? Was Venturi’s work really a bravura resolution of conflicting demands?’
Right The Sainsbury Wing was never meant to be used as the main entrance to the National Gallery, yet became so de facto in 2018 due to a number of security and logistical reasons
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141
