Selldorf Architects, National Gallery Sainsbury Wing remodel, 2025, London. Photo: National Gallery.
TO AN AMERICAN—at least to one who hasn’t been to the United Kingdom for a couple of years—there is something disturbing, almost science-fictional, about the words now carved opposite the grand staircase at the Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery: “THEIR MAJESTIES KING CHARLES III AND QUEEN CAMILLA RE-OPENED THIS BUILDING ON THE SIXTH DAY OF MAY, 2025.”
Notably, this date happened to be the day after I visited the recently refurbished space, which was unsettling in itself. But no more than the inscription as a whole, starting right at the top. “King Charles III”: The regnal name, etched into the cool burnished stone, looks invented, or like it should belong to someone else, someone whose portrait is probably hanging upstairs. A linen ruff, a Vandyke beard.
For Charles III, on the other hand, the dedicatory message must seem perhaps only too fitting, and long overdue. The monarch has been involved with the Sainsbury Wing from the jump: In 1982, the National Gallery staged a competition to expand onto the site immediately to its west, once home to a furniture store destroyed during the Blitz bombing campaign of WWII. The winning submission, an awkward tower-courtyard scheme from Ahrends, Burton, and Koralek, elicited the first of what would be a string of heartfelt pronouncements about architecture from the then–Prince of Wales, who called the design a “carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” His intervention prompted the museum board to take a radically different tack, turning to the Philadelphia-based husband-and-wife team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The intellectual godparents of postmodernism, the duo fashioned what would become arguably the most prominent specimen of the architectural movement in Great Britain, and among the most prominent worldwide.
Finally in possession of the throne, the king now also holds official title to the landmark annex structure that his mother inaugurated way back in 1991. But is it the kind of credit one should be eager to claim? Marred by controversy during the design process, the Sainsbury Wing was less than a hit when it debuted: “a piece of picturesque and mediocre slime,” averred the Architectural Review. The renovation, though it fixes some of Sainsbury’s most glaring functional defects and leaves its most admirable features intact, is not altogether satisfactory either, adding yet another twist to the building’s already knotty legacy in the UK. The forecast for po-mo in Britain, as for the idea of culture it was supposed to advance, is a little cloudy at the moment—although, as is often the case in those isles, moments of glorious sunshine do cut through the mizzle.
The Sainsbury was in some sense a test case for postmodernism’s historical mission. That the expansion would rise above a bomb site was significant—seventy thousand London buildings were destroyed during the Second World War, most of them replaced by concrete-and-glass structures that, even at their best, frequently disrupted the scale and consistency of the urban fabric. At Sainsbury, the firm of Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates (VSBA) took the rupture between the traditional and the contemporary city as their subject: As Barry Bergdoll wrote in Artforum in 2001, the building “[changes] in relationship to the microclimates of its divergent adjacencies . . . interweaving its forms with modernist gestures.” On its eastern front, the annex picks up where the colonnaded porch of William Wilkins’s 1838 National Gallery leaves off, presenting a series of decorative pilasters that march across the oblong volume at the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square; as they go along their southeasterly course, the classical details then steadily fall away to reveal a quite plain, modernist-inflected facade, as if the structure were bidding adieu to the monumental corridor and turning a fresh face toward the twentieth-century city beyond. More explicitly perhaps than any other building in po-mo’s 1980s and ’90s heyday, Sainsbury was an attempt to address, and provisionally to mend, the breach between past and present.
Its interior was a different story. While a portion of Sainsbury’s upper level provides space for the museum’s early-Renaissance collection, a major programmatic premise of the building was to relieve congestion. A combination gateway, information booth, and gathering space, Sainsbury would provide all the amenities that would never fit next door, with food and beverage above and bathrooms and auditorium below. And it was in this role that the VSBA project proved something of a downer—low ceilings, little natural light, and a bizarre profusion of nonstructural columns in the lobby rendered the putative welcome center distinctly unwelcoming. More than anything, it was the columns that proved the greatest source of friction between architects and client; the project’s chief backer, supermarket impresario Baron Sainsbury, pushed to nix them, but ultimately backed down after Venturi and Scott Brown threatened to walk off the job. The last laugh would belong to His Lordship: When the current renovation got underway and the hypostyle forest was at last cut down, a letter from the late Sainsbury was discovered inside one of the trunks, pronouncing himself “absolutely delighted” that posterity had come around.
Scott Brown and Venturi were many things. But they occasionally may have been confused about which things they were. In the 1983 BBC documentary Beyond Utopia, Venturi stands in the unfinished interior of the duo’s Wu Hall in Princeton and declares, “What I’m good at in this field [is], ‘Should it be this wide or that wide?’ Just the kind of sense of form and proportion that everybody forgets.” Not true: Compositional grace was not the practice’s strong suit; neither was spatial dynamism, nor technical wizardry, nor yet simple functional efficacy. What the office did do, better than any of their contemporaries, was to design buildings capable of critiquing the built environment that surrounded them, and of communicating their critique to the broadest audience possible. In Sainsbury, the architects were lodging a clear and cogent argument that London’s disparate urbanistic parts could indeed be made to operate in harmony. In post-Thatcherian England, where modernism—and the egalitarian political project of which it had been part—was still in rout, their intervention was a stirring polemic.
For the most part, the polemic comes across just fine in the $113 million renovation conducted by the New York–based office of Selldorf Architects. The classical-to-modern fade across the south side is just as it was; there’s even new signage over the cornice that cleverly folds around the rippling pilasters. A larger, sharply articulated entryway is likewise a smart yet subtle alteration—but inside, founding principal Annabelle Selldorf has taken a firmer hand. Peeling back the lobby ceiling, and clearing away some of those pesky columns, the German-born architect has created a persuasively civic atmosphere, almost an extension of the grand plaza outside. A café now stands beside the information desk, and the procession (past the uncanny inscription) to VSBA’s sweeping stairway (the best feature by far of the original interior) now feels reasonably intuitive. On ascending, however, the limited cards Selldorf was dealt appear obvious: Occupying what is now a mezzanine, the restaurant remains incredibly cramped. Selldorf plainly intended the piano-like curve of the upper-floor cutaway as a bit of visual drama, a peekaboo for those looking down as well as up. But it feels slightly arbitrary, at odds with the geometric logic of Venturi and Scott Brown’s polygonal box.
Other awkward moments aside, the mezzanine’s whiplash curve is the only instance in which the architect appears to be genuinely struggling against VSBA’s conceptual framework. The Sainsbury’s angular plan followed the historic streetline, and provides a straight passage toward the Jubilee Walkway, the pedestrian route that connects Trafalgar and Leicester Square. Selldorf might have brought some of that urbanistic thinking inside—and yet, most of her key decisions (as for example the extensive use of Pietra Serena stone, borrowed from the galleries above) feel more than adequately deferential to the existing structure. Among po-mo preservationists, an air of distrust has sprung up around the firm of Selldorf Architects: Its just-unveiled retooling of the Frick Collection entailed the reconfiguration of a faux-classical 1970s addition, redoubling suspicions born of the office’s contested adjustments to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, a VSBA commission from the mid-’90s. The latter rankled VSBA’s still-living partner, and her qualms have only been exacerbated by the new Sainsbury, which Scott Brown has referred to as now resembling “a circus clown in a tutu.” Such defensiveness seems off the mark. In London anyway, Selldorf has not come to bury the historicist enterprise of her predecessors; she has come, however imperfectly and tentatively, to reanimate it.
This is a timely maneuver. The political and economic vicissitudes of the past decade-plus seem to have deceived many in Britain (and elsewhere) into believing that the only alternative to the confusion of contemporary life is an unctuous, unreflective embrace of traditional culture and aesthetics. As the city’s premier artistic institution, the National Gallery is well positioned to weigh in on that score: to state, as the Selldorf/VSBA building now plainly does, that a building can speak to multiple values and temporalities at once, while still making an effective and appropriate portal to ancient treasures like van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, and Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, ca. 1485. It may seem surprising that a design born of royal prerogative could now stand as a paean to pluralism. But there it is—and in fact, its return to action may be part of a positive trend.
After a long period of disrepute, postmodernism is finally getting its due in Britain, with more and more specimens of the tendency being slated for protection; just last year, John Outram’s extraordinary, Egypto-funk Sphinx Hill house in Oxfordshire became the country’s youngest-ever Grade II–listed building. At the same time, practicing architects in the UK have been doing a great deal of historical-yet-somehow-not work of late, much of it excellent. At Oxford, David Kohn has created a quad for New College that doesn’t quite look like it was built in the 2020s yet couldn’t have been built in any other age: Elegant masonry meets curving rooflines meet irregular windows, all set around intimate, winding courtyards—a quaint English village, as if imagined by a 1920s Dutch modernist. Meanwhile, across London (and all across the internet) architect Peter Barber has caused a sensation with his council housing developments, upending the popular conception of government-sponsored projects as big and impersonal with a series of small-scale, finely textured courtyard buildings that foster a real sense of community.
Whatever the particular merits and demerits of the new and (mostly) improved Sainsbury, they shrink in significance when considered against the importance of putting such a building, and such an architecture, back into the spotlight. Selldorf’s spruced-up reception will now serve as the primary entrance to the whole National Gallery complex: Close to five million people a year will pass under the facade’s columnar collage, starting their journey through the history of art with a rhetorical statement on the role of history itself. At its best, the irreverent historicism pioneered by Venturi and Scott Brown, and carried on by some of their successors, teaches us that we do not have to choose between a false remembrance of what has come before and a fetishistic worship of the new. It is a lesson we would do well to heed.
