Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery

The Sainsbury Wing is an extension to the National Gallery, designed in competition in 1985 and developed through 1986–1987 before construction between 1988 and 1991. The architects were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates (known as Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown until 1989), working with Sheppard Robson Architects, with David Vaughan directing the project team. Structural and service engineers were Ove Arup and Partners with Jaros Baum and Bolles; lighting consultants Jules Fisher and Paul Marantz handled the lighting design; Arup Acoustics provided acoustics consultancy; Sir Robert McAlpine were the contractors; and Capricorn of London manufactured the steel railings, balustrades and gates.

Construction and Materials

The building has a reinforced concrete frame resting on bored piles and an exterior piled wall, with a deep basement. The roof structure is steel-framed with timber elements and is largely glazed. External cladding comprises Portland stone, buff brick and glass, with granite plinths and concrete panel soffits. Window units and glazed walls are set in powder-coated aluminium frames, with the glazed wall in dark grey featuring chunky, squared mouldings. Interior surfaces are clad in Chamesson limestone and render, with grey Florentine sandstone (pietra serena) used in the galleries. Floors are of Cumbrian slate or oak, and fixtures and fittings are in oak.

Layout and Plan

The building has a wedge-shaped footprint, connected to William Wilkins's original National Gallery by a bridge in the form of a glazed drum raised over a public pedestrian thoroughfare. It is arranged on five principal levels. The basement contains galleries and a cinema for temporary exhibitions beneath a 350-seat lecture theatre. The ground floor houses the entrance, shop and visitor facilities. At mezzanine level are a restaurant, coffee bar, conference rooms and information centre. The first floor contains galleries set at the same level as Wilkins's galleries. Lower levels also provide extensive storage, loading bays and garaging accessed from Whitcomb Street, while above the galleries are two levels of plant.

The levels are connected by, and the plan is organised around, a monumental staircase on the eastern side of the building. This extends from ground floor to first floor, and separately from ground floor to basement levels, with a core of lifts positioned behind it.

Three lines of galleries are arranged off the skewed main axis. The central line forms an enfilade, while the others have doorways set to one side to interrupt the vistas. Venturi believed that traditional galleries of modest size best suited the Early Renaissance collection, where many pieces are quite small.

Exterior

The gallery steps forward from the main building, with different treatments to each façade. The architects intended that "the new building is designed to be a reflection of and an extension to its context" and therefore "it presents a different face at each of its edges."

The building is clad in a skin of Portland stone with pilasters that repeat the details of those by Wilkins on his frontage, creating a sympathetic visual link with Canada House opposite. Venturi was inspired by oblique views of Wilkins's building, where the pilasters also appear to come together. The architects were keen to demonstrate that their pilasters were contextual rather than structural, with the stone skin also featuring blind windows in increasingly minimal mouldings as the columns become more spaced out.

Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall East Elevation

The canted but slightly curved elevation facing Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall East is faced in ashlar. It has grouped giant order pilasters on tall bases at the angles of the building, with a fluted pilaster between the entrance openings. The classical columns give way to Art Deco-inspired capitals and an increasingly simple order, which is reduced to small metal columns away from the Wilkins front. There are small blind openings in moulded architraves at high level, and a large full-height window with a crisply cut transom lighting the restaurant overlooking Pall Mall East. The parapet continues above both elevations, with a pierced balustrade at the eastern junction.

The entrance is set behind unmoulded flat-headed openings that pierce the outer skin, some positioned on the angle, protected by steel gates and railings the considerable height of the pilaster bases. On Pall Mall East these are framed by colourful Art Deco columns, a theme which continues to Whitcomb Street. The entrance comprises a series of offset geometrical forms. It has an inner glazed screen wall with a monumental frame into which paired oak doors and revolving doors are set in square openings, with the restaurant projecting above them. The entrance is faced with Portland stone panels that extend to a curved alcove at the southern end. The ceiling is incised in a geometric pattern on a large scale. Flooring is of stone and granite. To the west of the entrance, the name "THE NATIONAL GALLERY / SAINSBURY WING" is inscribed in stone.

Jubilee Walk Elevation

The Jubilee Walk elevation has a glazed curtain wall that rises in stages following the staircase above a flush ashlar base. To the north of the linking drum it is a predominantly blind elevation, pierced at high level by vents for the plant.

A shallow, open dome supported on Portland stone columns shields the pedestrian Jubilee Walk. On each elevation it has a curved window with fixed panes in a moulded architrave in early 19th-century tradition, lighting the link. The drum is clad in ashlar panels, with a pronounced moulded storey band and a parapet set back behind a cornice. At street level the drum has plain, square-headed openings and open panels above, resembling overlights. At each side, openings butt hard against the adjacent buildings or frame the Wilkins building windows. The soffit of the drum is of incised concrete or plaster. It has a granite floor which also extends via steps into the public domain beyond the footprint of the drum.

Whitcomb Street and St Martin's Street Elevations

The Whitcomb Street and St Martin's Street elevations rise as sheer walls, deliberately simple, clad in buff brick in Flemish bond above an ashlar base. On Whitcomb Street the base is moulded, continuing the theme from the pilasters. Shop windows with a central Art Deco column, a side entrance and a blind bay are set back in rectangular openings, one cutting into the corner with Pall Mall East. Above the shop windows are pairs of deep-set windows in rectangular openings serving the conference rooms, while the brickwork above is enlivened with vertical moulded strips aligned with the bays. The glazed roofs over the galleries are visible but set back behind the flush brick parapet. Punched into the north-west corner are two small windows above a set-back entrance. Access for vehicles has steel doors and windows, likened to the stage door and loading entrance found at the back of a theatre.

Rear Elevation

The rear elevation is dominated by the name "THE / NATIONAL / GALLERY" carved in stone in oversized lettering, included at the request of Westminster City Council. The use of large lettering, known as supergraphics, is a feature of Post-Modernism. At ground level is a large inscribed granite panel set in an ashlar surround describing the history of the site as royal mews, its use by Hamptons and Sons, and the Sainsbury bequest.

The gallery roofs are geometrical forms in two parallel ranges aligned roughly north-south and intended to be visible from below. They have hipped glazed superstructures and panelled or glazed flanks.

Interior

Throughout, the tone is one of subdued greys, redolent of the Italian Renaissance, with limestone and rendered walls and architectural dressings in darker Florentine pietra serena, with occasional brightly coloured Art Deco details and with oak joinery.

Entrance Hall

The entrance hall is low and relatively dark in contrast to the exterior, designed to suggest the crypt of an Italian church or basement level of a Palladian villa. Fat drum piers with simple incised bases in grey stone support a deep coffered ceiling with built-in lighting. The stairway is faced in large, widely spaced stone blocks, resembling giant rustication. The shop has a glazed screen wall framed by paired Art Deco shafts. The floor of the entrance hall is of grey patterned slate.

Monumental Staircase

A monumental staircase rises against the eastern wall, planned by Venturi and Scott Brown to cope with the large crowds attending the National Gallery by the 1980s, with Venturi likening the potential congestion to that of a sports stadium. Broad, unimpeded steps widen towards the top, and its glazed side wall provides a visual link with Trafalgar Square, the Wilkins building and the pedestrian way between the buildings at street level. Window units have deep square-sectioned frames, and the steel framing of the curtain wall continues as arches over the stairwell.

The internal wall of the stairs is of stone ashlar with classically proportioned windows of six-over-four panes in plain openings, as if it were the external wall of an older building that has been cut into to make entrances on the various levels. The stair is approached in a manner suggestive of an Italian cortile that in this case includes Jubilee Walk and is defined by the west wall of the Wilkins building and the interior wall of the Sainsbury Wing stairway. On the wall is a monumental frieze inscribed with the names of Italian Renaissance artists, carved by the letter carver Michael Harvey.

Mezzanine Level

Opening off the staircase at mezzanine level is a foyer leading to the restaurant, from which the glazed screen wall overlooks the entrance. Drum structural piers are again expressed in the lower inner section, while the taller front section has a top-lit ceiling. Mounted on the internal wall is the painting "Crivelli's Garden (the Visitation)" of 1990–1991 by Paula Rego, the theme deriving from the Early Renaissance collection in the gallery above. It was commissioned when Rego became the first National Gallery Associate Artist.

To the side and rear are a series of conference rooms, including the former Micro Gallery computer information room, leading off a curving corridor where panelled doors, architraves and dados are in oak.

Galleries

The sixteen galleries were specifically designed for the relatively small works of the Early Renaissance. Paired, engaged columns or columns in antis, essentially Tuscan in character, frame the lobby and principal entrance at the head of the stairs. Here and in the galleries, columns and skirtings are in pietra serena, while floors are principally of oak and internal window architraves and seats are in timber.

The galleries are laid out in three ranges. The central, tallest range is arranged in an enfilade, reminiscent of Sir John Soane's Dulwich Picture Gallery, while doorways in the side galleries are offset, providing oblique views across the width of the gallery space. The central galleries have tall arched openings, some framed by quarter columns, while smaller openings have square-headed moulded architraves. The openings create a false perspective as their width declines along the main axis towards the link with the Wilkins building.

The galleries are top-lit, with some side light admitted from the internal windows on the stairwell, which also offer slanted views towards Trafalgar Square. The ceilings rake inwards above a simplified cornice, and the galleries are lit by clerestorey glazing of small-paned, timber, fixed lights. In the smaller end galleries, lighting is provided by flat glazed ceilings, all of which are contained within the glazed roofspace above.

The calm plastered finishes owe something to the post-war work of Franco Albini and Carlo Scarpa in Italy, while the whole experience is designed to emulate Italian galleries in converted complexes such as the Sant'Agostino Museum in Genoa. Scott Brown noted: "The new spaces are grand but less so than those of Wilkins, and their sequences contain no violent jumps of scale. They wear their history lightly, suggesting that underneath is a modern gallery with non-structural walls. While planning we asked: 'What allowed palazzos to start as family homes and convert to public institutions, and how do they manage the phalanxes that throng European museums on Sundays?' And we designed concourse-like main spaces to take major crowds, with side rooms to provide a more intimate, overflow space, and alternative routes when the large galleries are full."

Basement Levels

Monumental stairs with a deep moulded cornice descend to the rear of the hall, again with a foyer at a half-landing giving access to the theatre. The lobby is lined in oak panelling with built-in seats and has a geometrical steel balustrade overlooking the stairs.

The theatre has raked seating for 340 people. It has slender internal piers, front and rear, with incised bases, and the walls are lined in plasterboard with a facetted acoustic finish.

At the lowest level is the temporary exhibition space of about 500 square metres divided into six galleries, reached by monumental doorways from a circular foyer with a slate floor.

The following elements are specifically excluded from the listing as not being of special architectural or historic interest: service, delivery and storage areas beyond the public domain with utilitarian painted blockwork walls and concrete floors and masonry stairs with steel balustrades; two levels of plant above and to the north of the main galleries and within the rear section of the building; service cores and other plant; kitchens; restaurant bar front and furniture; audio and visual equipment and lighting in the theatre and cinema; cloakrooms and WCs; temporary fixtures and fittings such as front desks; seats, audio and lighting equipment in the theatre; the interior of conference rooms; and the temporary exhibition space, which is designed to be flexibly laid out.