Degas vu

This week the National Gallery announced its intention to construct a completely new wing, to allow more works of art to be displayed and Trafalgar Square to be enhanced. The competition to design the new building was also launched, calling for an architecturally striking solution that is thoughtfully integrated with the existing gallery. Very generous private donations will cover most of the cost. It all sounds very positive... Except that the same institution did the same thing 45 years ago, and it didn’t go well.  

That was yesterday, in historical terms, and I’ll come back to it shortly; the new scheme is being called Project Domani, Italian for ‘tomorrow’. As for today, the Gallery is certainly keen. Like an artist eager to move on to the next picture even as the paint is drying on his last, Wednesday’s news – announced initially in The Times, via an interview with its director Gabriele Finaldi – comes mere weeks after its bicentenary project opened, and despite that scheme being half-finished.

The cool critical reaction to what has been completed so far doesn’t appear to have held Finaldi back either; it’s clear his plans must have been kept – like the paintings he cares for – behind glass for some time, ready to be released when funding was guaranteed, and architectural practices are being given only a month to submit their initial entries.

The site sits to the north west of the Gallery. It is currently occupied by a Brutalist sixties office block called St Vincent House (co-incidentally but fittingly, St. Vincent de Paul was a 17th century French priest who is the patron saint of all works of charity). This will be replaced, though the competition brief is careful to require some retention or recycling to align with sustainability concerns, with up to 7,000sqm of accommodation to include 2,400sqm of galleries, conservation space and so on.

Although the block is surrounded by roads and invisible from Trafalgar Square or indeed Leicester Square, the Gallery is demanding much more than an anonymous box for art – the tension between the two could be termed the corner conundrum.

We’re told the new wing will need to be of “exceptional architectural merit” and “international significance”, and that it must position the Gallery as “not just a repository of art but a cultural landmark, enriching the nation’s artistic legacy on a global scale.” Finaldi himself wants “a defining feature of contemporary architecture in the UK and internationally, inspiring future architectural endeavours”, something that will “redefine how art is experienced and celebrated”. Oh and it is expected to reinforce “the proprietorial pride of those living in London and the UK.” Phew. There’s an awful lot more than that; rather like those bullet-pointed lists of requirements found in job ads, I actually lost count of the number of adjectives used to describe how good the new building has to be. And, just like those ads, one is tempted to conclude that even the world’s best might find compliance unachievable.

Of course, the proverbial elephant in the room (though the Gallery has several painted elephants in its existing rooms) is that earlier extension project, begun in 1981. This did indeed see the world’s best enter another architectural contest, and it became national news but sadly for all the wrong reasons. The worry is that the same thing will happen this time round…

William Wilkins’ initial suite of rooms had been repeatedly added to by subsequent generations, and this continued after World War 2 when the site of Hampton’s department store to the west was purchased by the government – which founded and still owns the Gallery. When the decision to build there was finally taken under Margaret Thatcher’s tenure the intention was to grant a long lease to a commercial partner who would erect an office block for his own use (and largely at his own cost) but include within it space for the National Gallery. A competition was duly launched in which architectural practices teamed up with developers, and the public saw the seven shortlisted entries in 1982. No-one now remembers most of those, but everyone remembers two of them.

The most popular was by Ahrends Burton Koralek, who made their name in the Seventies at Britain’s new universities and had expanded into libraries, offices and housing. It was distinguished by the grand civic gesture of its three-quarter-circle plan facing the existing building, creating a public piazza embraced by curving top-lit galleries above the office floors.

The most controversial was by the Richard Rogers Partnership, which was part-way through construction of its new building for Lloyd’s of London in the Square Mile. Deploying the same language of a rational central volume surrounded by service towers, all clad in stainless steel, one of these was taken much higher and topped with a circular observation platform.

The shortlist of three that emerged from this stage of the process included the former but not the latter, though some of the Gallery’s judges were unhappy with aspects of ABK’s design and preferred that by Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

The government acknowledged this and allowed trustees a free vote but with the caveat that rejection would end the project. ABK was in the end selected, working with Trafalgar House, but those frictions led to months of negotiations over the design, including straightening those curved galleries. It became more conventional yet gained its own tall tower, and modifications continued until the government called in the whole scheme in 1984 and held a public enquiry. Even as evidence was being taken, the then Prince Charles – in an intervention that surely looks even more inappropriate looking back – made his own views known in an infamous speech that year that was nominally marking the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

The preferred design, he said, resembles “a kind of municipal fire station, complete with the sort of tower that contains the siren”. It’s not in fact clear whether the Prince was describing ABK’s scheme or that of RRP, because in his very next sentence he decried “this type of high-tech approach,” but regardless it was the second half of that line that stuck to the winning entry and in doing so doomed the entire affair when the heir to the throne warned against placing a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”

The inspector recommended approval of the ABK design but the secretary of state overruled him and refused planning permission, halting the scheme, though the early Eighties recession was in any event making the commercial element difficult in itself.

There things might have rested forever but for another, more positive, intervention from outsiders. The next year, the Sainsbury brothers promised sufficient money to fund the Gallery’s needs on the Hampton site, doing away with the need to engage a commercial partner. This also changed the selection of an architect, however, since only those invited to tender could respond and only those known for more traditional designs were now invited. There was no public consultation. With a new design selected in 1987 and after several years of construction the Sainsbury Wing, designed in the Post-Modern style by Venturi Scott Brown, opened in 1991.

It is a curious set of events, then, that brought about one of the great ‘What ifs’ of London’s built history. So what might today’s equivalent project yield in the way of actual architecture rather than arguments? Until the first stage is concluded we can only speculate, but an informed look at the site, the brief and contemporary cultural projects assists.

Starting with the setting, there is a significant component of public realm work in that brief, with entrants required to improve the pedestrian experience in those surrounding streets, provide ‘greening’ and better link Trafalgar and Leicester Squares. A quick look at those streets now shows both the potential for that but also the problems.

Effort was made to stitch the Sainsbury Wing into what already existed via a modest, planted piazza and attention paid to its rear wall, in addition to the drum-like passageway between it and the Wilkins block. But the crassly cubic Londoner hotel immediately north is unwelcoming and restricts its own permeability to Leicester Square, presenting instead its loading bay to the Gallery. There are no other neighbours with potential, although the brief more or less demands collaboration in this area. The new wing is required to connect to the Sainsbury Wing and the North block (built in 1975 and now the education area) at gallery level, which must mean bridges over those roads since the parallel call for “a permeable ground floor that engages with the public realm” would appear to rule out the much simpler and more space-efficient option of filling the entire plot with a two-storey volume.

Squaring the circle of attractive streets, almost certainly pedestrianised, around an attractive new building without the presumed bridges overshadowing the one and crashing into the other won’t be easy.

The external appearance of the new wing will of course be the primary concern of most, yet here there is very little that might reasonably deduced even after sifting those words for meaning. Certainly it’s unlikely that we’ll see anything as radical as Richard Rogers’s scheme from 1982 or even ABK’s, which is a shame as both featured below-grade areas that handled the fall of ground in more interesting ways that simple slopes.

The various stages of the Gallery’s expansion can be read as separate palazzos, especially from the north, each with architectural merit. There is therefore the opportunity to make the new wing the next block in that sequence, “complementing the diversity and quality that is there already, with a timeless design that pays particular attention to detail and is crafted from quality materials” to quote the brief. All of those existing buildings are Classical to one degree or another, including the North block whose rather elegant Modernist cornice is nevertheless clearly in that earlier tradition. The materiality is also consistent, all being built from or clad with Portland stone.

It would be a bold architect to push against either tradition here, I think, even without that cautionary note from the brief – it’s not the place for extensive glazing or planes of brick. But looking around the world at recent civic projects brings clues as to possible ways forward. Renzo Piano’s superb Parliament House in Valletta and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s The Broad in Los Angeles both feature a neutral style and a perforated façade, this last in stone and concrete respectively. Either wouldn’t displease in WC2. And Rogers’s practice, in the form of partner Graham Stirk, tried an intriguing if not wholly successful approach to contemporary intervention in a broadly Classical environment at the nearby British Museum when inserting a large new block alongside the Greek Revival original.

And then we have the interiors, about which there is even less to draw out from the brief save that they “must flow into and from the existing galleries in a continuum, almost without pause”. In this regard the Sainsbury Wing has always been accounted a success, with its quiet, almost austere rooms for the Gallery’s Renaissance collection neatly arranged to continue the axis set up by Wilkins and set up its own.

Some interest might be found in answering an additional call, for “vertical and horizontal porosity that builds on existing spatial relationships and proportions.” Here the Sainsbury Wing’s immense, theatrical stair scores (embarrassingly, it is only whilst writing this piece that I have realised it widens as it rises, after its apparent model – Bernini’s Scala Regia in the Vatican) and means the requirement for gallery-level continuity of floors doesn’t force the provision of another. But one or two smaller, more crafted examples might be wrought within the new wing to create interest. The hang of the collection itself will be a matter for the Gallery which, it was also announced, will now acquire post-1900 works, eroding collecting boundaries with the Tate.

So there we are. Practices around the world will I suspect be scrambling to interpret the brief and all of its formal documentation, formulate some plans and create their boards, all in time for 17 October. But as they do, there’s one final point to flag.

Buried in the small print of the brief, you’ll see that “The purpose of this competition is to identify the most inspirational and capable architectural team for this project” rather than design an actual building. That was the way RRP was selected by Lloyd’s, who were running out of space at their second purpose-designed building and so were conscious they needed a solution first and a building second.

Maybe the firm should take note and dust off their 1982 scheme. After all, if you stay around long enough you’ll find everything old is new again.