In London, a Venturi-Scott Brown masterpiece is under threat
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Copy———-This item was originally published en Common Edge.
Despite its dazzling collection of masterpieces, London’s National Gallery has been cursed with a series of ill-advised architectural schemes during its two centuries of existence. Only once did its leaders make a truly inspired and visionary decision: in the mid-1980s, the gallery held a competition, won by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown (VRSB) of Philadelphia, to build a special collections building.
The addition was built between 1988 and 1991, using funds donated by the Sainsbury family as a gift to the nation and was immediately hailed as one of the finest buildings of its kind erected in the 20th century. It has remained popular with Londoners and has served as a lackluster expansion to the classic William Wilkins building ever since. Experts in the work of Robert Venturi, John Rauch and Denise Scott Brown consider it one of his masterpieces. Apparently the National Gallery has a different opinion.
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The main problem here is that of poor planning. The original 1832 building was reviled from the moment it opened and never functioned properly. Various additions in the second half of the 19th century improved things somewhat, but were inadequate in solving the circulation problem: a central axial entrance sequence could not distribute visitors along the enormous length of the original wings of the Gallery. Today, the monumental exterior stairs – which have worked well for able-bodied visitors – cannot accommodate the crowds who want to see the different parts of the museum.
Even a ground floor lobby designed in 2003-2004 by Dixon Jones could not handle traffic. It is small and located to the east of EM Barry’s inner cross staircase. A better solution would have demolished that stairway and created a grand entrance hall like the one in Richard Morris Hunt’s Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the beautiful but also threatened stairwell hall at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, with a coordinated exterior staircase.
Both of these New York buildings offer valuable lessons. Thomas Hoving, the director of the Met during the 1960s, clearly saw the need for a better staircase and built the current one to handle larger crowds. It is now one of the most popular public spaces in Manhattan.
Britain’s National Gallery has not been so progressive. Although the street in front of the massive building is now closed to traffic, making it part of the plaza, no one seems to have suggested a new entrance stairway or pavilion that could handle the current crowds. (The administration would not hire John Simpson, who provided a grand new entrance to the Queen’s Galleries at Kensington Palace.) NG200, the euphemism for a “future-readiness” master plan issued by the gallery last year, eschews manipulation of “listed” areas of the vast museum and instead targets small areas in the Sainsbury Wing and other ancillary parts of the building, hardly the kind of “visionary” approach that could be justified in the 200th anniversary of its foundation. Unfortunately, recent administrators have behaved like other museum directors, simply hoping that the next generation will solve persistent problems. Like COVID, there seems to be a virus circulating among the leaders of cultural institutions that prevents them from exercising bold leadership.
Sainsbury’s ‘wing’ was never intended to be the main entrance to the huge museum, only a means of ascending to a set of galleries built for the purpose of displaying specific Renaissance masterpieces, such as the unfinished Madonna of the Rocks of Leonard. In fact, it is expressly dissociated from the great main wings and placed at a slight angle to Trafalgar Square, the only part of the museum so arranged. The museum’s current director, Gabriele Finaldi, is convinced that the habits of Londoners who like the “new wing” more than the old should be seen as a reason to move the main entrance there, but sadly he is wrong. VRSB created a pinch point, a distinctive rotunda, at the juncture between the two buildings, a space that prevents large numbers of patrons from passing through what is clearly a side entrance to the main galleries. A competent museum architect would see this and advise against any plans to change circulation, but unfortunately the National Gallery did not hire such a professional following a search in 2021; instead, he got Selldorf Architects.
Annabelle Selldorf emerged after her Ronald Lauder’s Manhattan Townhouse Renovation —which became the popular New gallery for the display of her collection of modern Viennese works—as the go-to architect for fashion-conscious art museums in the 1990s. Her light touch in creating galleries in a magnificent Carrère & Hastings building was justly praised , but there I had a relatively easy problem to solve. Trained as a modernist (she’s German but attended Syracuse and a master’s program in Europe), she came to New York and set her sights on an underserved market for specialists in adaptive reuse, work that many prominent Manhattan architects considered below them. However, subsequent commissions for renovations or additions to important historic buildings have not justified her elevation to star architect status.
Selldorf has become something of a specialist in desecrating art museums associated with Robert Venturi and his associates, and the work of Carrère & Hastings. When the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art needed a “renovation” in 2018, she immediately suggested removing the entire work completed just two decades earlier by VRSB. Its soft, generically modernist expansion not only denied visitors the experience of whimsy and delight in the earlier entrance sequence, it deflated the impact of Irving Gill’s original masterful façade. His brief specified the need to expand the gallery space, not a new entrance. The result is more than disappointing — it’s disastrous. However, it seems to have improved his reputation.
Selldorf recently, amid widespread condemnation from New York preservationists, demolished John Barrington Bayley’s Entrance Pavilion and John Russell Pope’s Fountain Court at the Frick Museum to create his ugly and forgettable “expansion” of the popular museum — a permanent collection that needed no expansion. Such complacency with art experts, oligarchs, and museum curators trying to create “makeovers” for their failing museums has given him a certain prestige in the art world. Selldorf has become the safest choice among some modernist companies doing museum work. as Rowan Moore recently wrote in The Guardianhis “is an almost empty architecture, the default style of the good taste of the international art world”.
In fact, the ground-floor renovation of VRSB’s lively Sainsbury’s lounge looks a lot like the third-rate interior of a suburban office park. An S-shaped balcony with smooth glass balustrades is supported by kitschy wood-clad pilings, fattened to invoke the wonderful Venturi columns above. Instead of the color the original architects suggested to bring the gray staircase to life, Selldorf painted everything in eggshell — safe enough for an HGTV makeover, but barely colorful. This is a Wimpyburger that should have been a Big Mac, let alone a fancy 1930s White Towers burger. The kind of good taste that Selldorf cooks must come with a heavy dose of sriracha sauce, since there’s no meat in bread. Not even black beans.
Although the National Gallery suggests that the designs will be scrutinized by “the public” before being approved, and Selldorf has reportedly “contacted” Denise Scott Brown for comment, this looks like whitewashing with a bit of gaslighting to enhance the brightness. Although he died in 2018, Venturi remains the scapegoat for cultural gatekeepers who want to relegate postmodernism to the dustbin of false history. As I’ve written before on Common Edge, there is no excuse for the stupid, ill-informed and destructive ideas of our “best and brightest” contemporary architects. The best architects, no matter their style, race or gender, should work to preserve masterpieces like the Sainsbury Wing from ill-advised management tactics to “update” their long-standing features and protect them from sycophants like Dottore Finaldi. As a historic preservation specialist, I am embarrassed by my colleagues, most of whom fight to save great buildings regardless of their age or style. Selldorf does the equivalent of changing ball feet and claws and carving his initials into the top of a priceless Chippendale table.
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