‘Tranquillising good taste’: can the National Gallery’s airy new entrance exorcise its demons?

When the Sainsbury Wing opened, it was called ‘vulgar pastiche’. Now, after an £85m revamp, it has become the famous gallery’s main entrance. But have its spiky complexities been tamed? And why all the empty space?Few parts of any city have seen so many style wars waged over their future as the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square. Nelson may be safely ensconced on his column, but another Battle of Trafalgar has been rumbling for decades beneath his feet, seeing architectural grenades hurled to and fro at the western end of the National Gallery.A 1950s competition first produced a bold brutalist plan to extend the gallery, formed of crisscrossing cantilevered planes jutting out into the square, but it was deemed too daring. The 1980s saw a glassy, hi-tech proposal, crowned with futuristic pylons, but it was famously dismissed by the then Prince Charles as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. Finally, emerging victorious in the 1990s were the US pioneers of postmodernism Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Their high mannerist mashup combined corinthian pilasters and big tinted windows with witty abandon. “Palladio and modernism fight it out on the main facade,” declared the architects, as they immortalised the battle of taste in stone and glass. The Sainsbury Wing was Grade-I listed in 2018, one of the youngest ever buildings to receive such protection. Continue reading...

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