Born in controversy, the National Gallery wing was a lesson in throwing away the architects’ rulebook. Now plans to remodel it threaten its quirky splendour
The Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, tucked into a corner of Trafalgar Square, which opened in 1991, is a building like no other. The galleries on its upper level, containing works by Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca and other masters of the Italian renaissance, achieve a widely admired combination of serenity, substance and character – “practically perfect”, says the gallery’s director Gabriele Finaldi. Its exterior wears multiple guises: classical stonework, modernist steel and glass, utilitarian brickwork. Its interior runs a gamut of different spaces.
Designed by the Philadelphia-based partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, it delights in playing architectural styles off each other. It celebrates what Venturi called, in the title of a famous book of his, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. It also has some bum notes, in part because Venturi and Scott Brown had some rows with the gallery and the project’s donors, and it wasn’t realised quite as they proposed.
