First look at Selldorf Architects’ rework of National Gallery Sainsbury Wing

‘For what it’s worth, I’ve put my heart and soul into this project. I felt really proud seeing the building across Trafalgar Square this morning: it has a sort of renewed presence.’

I’m sitting talking to Annabelle Selldorf on sun-dappled seating in a newly double-height section of the entrance lobby in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, which reopens this weekend.

Her practice, known for high-end commercial art galleries and responsible for the just-finished refurb of the Frick in New York, won the 2021 competition to refit the entrance to the Sainsbury and transform it into the main entry point to the gallery, part of the £85 million NG200 Welcome building programme initiated to mark the gallery’s 200th anniversary.

The scheme reworks the space designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in 1991. This, together with a rehang of the whole collection and a new education centre designed by Lawson Ward, is planned to help the gallery cope with the growing demands placed on a 21st-century museum: increased visitor numbers, security and improved accessibility.

While the project passed relatively smoothly through planning, it has not been without its critics – in particular, Denise Scott Brown, the surviving half of Venturi, Scott Brown, who in 2023 said the proposals looked like ‘a circus clown wearing a tutu’.

‘I don’t know exactly what she was getting at,’ says Selldorf: ‘I wondered even if she meant me? I mean I did dress as a clown for carnival as a child in Cologne [her home city] but that’s about it.’ Was she surprised by Scott Brown’s intervention?  ‘Well, I didn’t think that ultimately it was helpful or productive how she behaved.’

Still, the National Gallery extension has long been a touch paper for architectural sturm und drang. In 1984, a rather English architectural culture war was lit between Modernism and traditional (read Classicist) architecture when at the RIBA’s 150th anniversary dinner, the guest of honour, Prince Charles, unexpectedly castigated the earlier competition-winning design for the extension by Ahrends Burton and Koralek (ABK) as a ‘massive carbuncle on the face of a well-loved and elegant friend’.

His speech not only provided traction in the casting of Modernist architecture as being to blame for many of society’s ills, but more immediately led to ABK’s design being refused planning permission and shelved.

A second competition for the extension followed in 1986 with a revised brief that no longer needed to incorporate commercial office space to pay for it due to backing by supermarket money, stumped up by the Sainsbury family. Against Postmodern-heavy competition, it was won by Venturi, Scott Brown, with the Sainsbury Wing, as it became known, finally opening in 1991. 

Its design pleased no one in particular, its relatively bloodless etiolated Pomo exterior having none of the throaty, jokey inventiveness of Venturi, Scott Brown’s earlier work. But it effectively drew a literal veil over the earlier Classical vs Modernist controversy by playing a restrained mannerist game, mimicking the stonework and Classical detailing of the adjacent main National Gallery building designed by William Wilkins in 1838. Its façade of pastiche columns and capitals, clustered to one side as though drawn back like a curtain, allowed space for a series of contrastingly undecorated entrance portals, punctured through the stone, the pure façadism further emphasised by a glazed, gridded steel side elevation.

Inside, the gallery spaces were always judged more successful – ‘almost perfect’ as the gallery’s current director, Gabriele Finaldi, has described them. Tasked with housing the Early Renaissance collection, Venturi, Scott Brown created a grid of lofty spaces connected by elongated arched portals, which, with their slightly stage-set feel, echo the stretched architectural forms and mini-cityscapes seen in the paintings they house. The gilded frames and colours of these are beautifully set off and intensified too by moody-coloured walls and the blue-grey of the Pietra Serena limestone columns.

These galleries, and a basement exhibition gallery, are reached by wide flights of stairs, lined satisfyingly at times with the exuberant Pomo details: oversized sections of hanging cornice, and at times with a chunky steel grid of glazed wall.

‘It’s been described as Mies meets Palladio,’ says Purcell’s head of design, Alasdair Travers, who acted as both heritage and executive architect on the project. ‘But it’s way more complicated than that. Venturi, Scott Brown never play it straight. The challenge has been calibrating the level of change versus conservation: whether to go toe-to-toe with Pomo, to overtly not play the game or something in between.’

The entrance spaces below the main galleries were always rather less satisfactory, in part because Venturi, Scott Brown had to include a mezzanine to accommodate all the necessary service functions.

‘It was a relatively small volume that was always overloaded with requirements due to the constraints that produced the building,’ says Selldorf. ‘It needed to provide a connection up to the gallery level. But this acted like a lid below which there was only so much space to accommodate a restaurant, bookstore, conference rooms, cloakroom and ticket desk. And then there were more and more visitors. As a result, it was packed and wasn’t welcoming at all.’

The relatively low, tightly-bounded and heavily columned entrance hall that resulted certainly always felt more like an undercroft. Venturi, Scott Brown described it as ‘compressed’, making a virtue of this in contrast to the release of space in the galleries above. When the Sainsbury Wing was listed Grade I in 2018, it was likened to ‘the crypt of an Italian church, or basement level of a Palladian villa’. The relative gloom was augmented too by the dark glass fitted in the stairwall, intended to help rest visitors’ eyes before the contrasting brilliance of the paintings above.

It was the dispelling of this gloomy quality – by what Selldorf describes as a series of ‘surgical’ interventions to make the gallery more ‘open and welcoming’ – that, in particular, provoked the small storm of criticism among a handful of architects, critics and heritage organisations like the Twentieth Century Society, which warned that the changes threatened the spirit of the original design, and which culminated in Scott Brown’s ‘circus clown wearing a tutu’ comments.

‘I have enormous respect and admiration for her work and that of her husband,’ says Selldorf. ‘But she thought that could hold up the process. And the real issue was that she didn’t recognise contemporary needs, and couldn’t recognise them because she hasn’t been here in 30 years.

‘We did a very, very large survey of people on how they experienced this museum, and identified what wasn’t working for visitors and how they didn’t find it welcoming at all. I mean, I wasn’t making it up or proposing changes for my own ego. Every single thing we’ve done was considered on the basis of public benefit.’

In particular, Selldorf’s design has reduced and peeled back the mezzanine floor, so it reads much more like a mezzanine gallery, creating double-height space to either side, in order to increase the visibility of the main stair, as well as moving and reducing the number of columns (two of which were non-structural) to open up the space and increase natural light levels, replacing the dark glass of the stairwall with clear, which allows for more visible interaction between inside and outside too. ‘People want to know where they are in the building and can see in and see out,’ she says.

One key interior move, to be completed in a future phase, is a new underground link that connects through to the Wilkins Building off the main stairs where they lead down at the rear of the entrance lobby, rather cul-de-sac-like at present, serving only the theatre and temporary exhibition gallery below. This link will not only enable a much better connection between the two, but has also incrementally created space for a new cloakroom and toilets.

Selldorf admits that the series of interventions ‘together amount to a significant change’ but insists it has not ‘taken away the original sensibility’. So is the Pomo spirit preserved? And how do these interventions measure up on first view?

From the outside, the most significant intervention is the removal of the west end of the raised terrace in front of the Wilkins building, creating a new forecourt in front of the Sainsbury Wing entrance. This serves to open up and emphasise the cut-through pedestrian route of Jubilee Walk, which connects indirectly through to Leicester Square under the Venturi, Scott Brown-designed ‘Bridge of Sighs’ link between the Sainsbury Wing and the Wilkins building. It also clarifies the relationship between the symmetrically like/unlike façades and features of the two buildings, emphasising the mannerist play of Venturi, Scott Brown’s architecture.

A frieze of large metal lettering now runs along the cornice of the Sainsbury Wing spelling out the National Gallery, while the newly clear glazing to the internal staircase serves to animate the façade from within. Together all these moves successfully reinforce the presence of the Sainsbury Wing from afar and help it hold the corner of Trafalgar Square.

On entering, slim vertical scanners – no doubt benefitting from technology seen at airports – mean visitors’ bags can be security checked without being unpacked. ‘It’s all designed to help make a good start to their visit,’ says Travers.

But inside, it’s a more mixed picture. The original low ceiling of the lobby now reads as a mezzanine between two double-height spaces – one creating a defined seating space adjacent to a small espresso bar, and the other foregrounding the foot of the stairs up to the galleries. ‘You are now much more led by light as to how it works,’ says Travers.

Columns that used to almost randomly populate the space have been thinned out and more clearly define the mezzanine’s edge. Meanwhile, large video signage and screens can be programmed to assist wayfinding or showcase works from the collection. ‘Before, you had to get quite deep into the plan before you knew where you were going,’ says Travers. ‘Everything is now much clearer from the point that you enter.’

These big moves succeed in what they aim to do, emphasising the stair and wayfinding and bringing light into the lobby – helped by an increase of 60 per cent in publicly accessible space.

Above, the mezzanine is now more open and houses a bookshop, event space and reconfigured WCs as well as a more high-end restaurant, culminating in a de-rigueur cocktail bar with views over Trafalgar Square, designed presumably to be able to be open late or hireable separately.

But it all undoubtedly dispels the previous slightly chthonic experience of the Venturi, Scott Brown original, and the design falls down on smaller moves and strangely wilful details: the original grey gridded flooring changed to a blander limestone, and the ceiling coffers reworked as randomly diagonal coved striations with slim rectangles of Murano glass acting as lightshades, looking elegant but feeling strangely domestic in scale. Above, obscured glass balustrades effectively cut out much of the visual connection between the two levels, while the randomly curved edge of the mezzanine seems to speak a different architectural language to the rest.

Delightfully, last summer, a letter from one of the original funders, the late Simon Sainsbury, was found buried in one of the false columns when it was removed, stating: ‘I believe that the false columns are a mistake of the architect and that we would live to regret our accepting this detail of his design’. I ask Selldorf if she feels this vindicates her rework of the space but she sidesteps the question, saying what interested her most was ‘how much civility this patron had to let the architects prevail, despite his very strong objections. It’s pretty remarkable.’

But what it served to show is how all spaces are ultimately compromises and the result of competing visions and not something set in aspic. For all the praise for the ‘rich and complex’ architecture of Venturi, Scott Brown’s lobby, ‘dark’ and ‘confusing’ have also been epithets used to describe it, and it’s clear what side Selldorf, the go-to architect for limpid white art spaces, is on. What has resulted is a space that’s undoubtedly more functional and welcoming, but perhaps rather more generic and less memorable too.

Project data

Location Trafalgar Square, London
Start on site March 2023
Completion date May 2025 (Phase 1)
Gross internal floor area 4,500m² (Phase 1); 1,500m² (Phase 2)
Project cost £85 million (total for all NG200 projects)
Architect Selldorf Architects
Executive architect Purcell
Client National Gallery
Structural engineer Arup
M&E consultant Arup
Quantity surveyor Gardiner & Theobald
Landscape consultant Vogt
Planning consultant The Planning Lab
Civil engineer Arup
Acoustic consultant Arup
AV/IT consultant Arup
Lift consultant Arup
BOH lighting consultant Arup
Sustainability consultant Arup
Daylighting consultant Arup
Pedestrian flow consultant Arup
Lighting consultant L’Observatoire International
Catering consultant Kendrick Hobbs
Access consultant Jane Simpson Access / David Bonnett
Wayfinding and graphics Thomas Matthews
Digital visitor experience The Office of Future Interactions
Community engagement Kaizen
Fire engineer OFR Consultants
Security consultant MFD/Thornton Tomasetti
Business case advisory services Colley Associates
Vibration consultant Bickerdike Allen
Project manager Gardiner & Theobald
Construction manager Gardiner & Theobald
Principal designer Annabelle Selldorf
Approved building inspector AIS Chartered Surveyors/Assent
Main contractor Sir Robert McAlpine
CAD software used Revit/Autocad/Rhino