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Sainsbury Wing
Sainsbury Wing
General information
Town or city	London
Country	United Kingdom
Client	National Gallery
Design and construction
Architect(s)	Venturi Scott Brown and Associates

The Sainsbury Wing is an extension to the National Gallery in London, built in 1991 to house the gallery's earliest Renaissance paintings. It was designed by Venturi Scott Brown Associates, an American architectural practice headed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and is their only building in the United Kingdom to date. Its construction was funded by the brothers John, Simon and Sir Tim Sainsbury, members of the prominent family that founded the Sainsbury's supermarket chain. The building is a notable example of the Postmodernist style in Britain.

The building occupies a site on the north-western corner of Trafalgar Square, where a nineteenth-century building, Hampton's department store, had stood until its destruction in the Blitz. The National Gallery had long sought expansion into this space and in 1982 an open competition was held to find a suitable architect. The winning proposal, a high-tech design by the firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, prompted a notorious criticism from the Prince of Wales which led to its subsequent rejection. At a formal dinner he declared the design to be "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an elegant and much-loved friend", thus introducing a new term into British architectural discourse.

History

The building occupies the "Hampton's site" to the west of the main building, where a department store of the same name had stood until its destruction in the Blitz. The Gallery had long sought expansion into this space and in 1982 a competition was held to find a suitable architect; the shortlist included a radical high-tech proposal by Richard Rogers, among others. The design that won the most votes was by the firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, who then modified their proposal to include a tower, similar to that of the Rogers scheme.^[f]

One of the conditions of the 1982 competiton was that the new wing had to include commercial offices as well as public gallery space. However, in 1985 it became possible to devote the extension entirely to the Gallery's uses, due to a donation of almost £50 million from Lord Sainsbury and his brothers Simon and Sir Tim Sainsbury. A closed competition was held, and the schemes produced were noticably more restrained than in the earlier competition.

Robert Venturi impressed the jury with his knowledge of Italian church interiors, gleaned as a prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome in the 1950s. (Smith 2009, 156)

An inscription in the staircase hall, listing the names of artists from Duccio to Raphael, was carved by Michael Harvey.^[1] This has been seen as a fulfilment of the architect E. M. Barry's desire to build a monumental staircase in the National Gallery, which he failed to do in 1866. (Whitehead, p. xvi)

In contrast with the rich ornamentation of the main building, the galleries in the Sainsbury Wing are pared-down and intimate, to suit the smaller scale of many of the paintings. The main inspirations for these rooms are Sir John Soane's toplit galleries for the Dulwich Picture Gallery^[2] and the church interiors of Filippo Brunelleschi (the stone dressing is in pietra serena, the grey stone local to Florence). The northernmost galleries align with Barry's central axis, so that there is a single vista down the whole length of the Gallery. This axis is exaggerated by the use of false perspective, as the columns flanking each opening gradually diminish in size until the visitor reaches the focal point of (as of 2008), an altarpiece by Cima of The Incredulity of St Thomas.

Venturi's postmodernist approach to architecture is in full evidence at the Sainsbury Wing, with its stylistic quotations from buildings as disparate as the clubhouses on Pall Mall, the Scala Regia in the Vatican, Victorian warehouses and Ancient Egyptian temples.

References

^ Baines & Dixon 2003, p. 129
^ Powell

Bibliography

Amery, Colin (1992), A Celebration of Art and Architecture: National Gallery Sainsbury Wing, London: National Gallery Company
Baines, Phil; Dixon, Catherine (2003), Signs: lettering in the environment, London: Laurence King Publishing
Bradley, Simon; Pevsner, Nikolaus (2003), London: Westminster, The Buildings of England, vol. 6, London and New Haven: Yale University Press
Conlin, Jonathan (2006), The Nation's Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery, London: Pallas Athene
Crookham, Alan (2009), The National Gallery: An Illustrated History, London: National Gallery Company
Ghirardo, Diane (1996), Architecture After Modernism, London: Thames & Hudson
Jencks, Charles (1991), Post-Modern Triumphs in London, London and New York: Academy Editions, St. Martin's Press
Smith, Charles Saumarez (2009), The National Gallery: A Short History, London: Frances Lincoln Limited
Wilson, Andrew, ed. (2008), The Simon Sainsbury Bequest to Tate and the National Gallery, London: Tate Publishing

Bryant, Barbara (2013), Two Temple Place: A Perfect Gem of Late Victorian Art, Architecture and Design, London: Two Temple Place
Hulme, Graham; Buchanan, Brian; Powell, Kenneth (2000), The National Portrait Gallery: An Architectural History, London: National Portrait Gallery
Porter, Bernard (2011), The Battle of the Styles: Society, Culture and the Design of a New Foreign Office, 1855–61, Continuum
Savage, Nicholas (2018), Burlington House: Home of the Royal Academy of Arts, London: Royal Academy of Arts
Tames, Richard (2013), Parliament and its Buildings, Shire Publications

[1] Baines & Dixon 2003, p. 129

[2] Powell

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