Sainsbury Wing

The National Gallery’s extension is a postmodern conversation with the old museum. The façade on Trafalgar Square picks up the pilasters of the main building but lets them thin out and disappear. Inside, Renaissance paintings hang in rooms with grey stone as in a Florentine church.

The National Gallery needed a new wing for its early Renaissance paintings. A first proposal was criticised by Prince Charles in 1984, who called it a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend. The Sainsbury brothers offered to pay for a new building, and after a new competition Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were chosen. The extension was built in 1988–1991.

The façade on Trafalgar Square is of Portland stone, the same material as the main building. It has pilasters that imitate William Wilkins’s museum, but they cluster closely by the old building and grow ever sparser towards the corner. The façade is flat like a stage flat. Inside, a broad staircase leads along a glass wall up to the galleries. The galleries are inspired by Brunelleschi’s churches in Florence, with grey stone and white plastered walls, and axes leading to large altarpieces.

The Sainsbury Wing shows postmodernism’s idea that a building should adapt to its context and communicate with it. It was listed in 2018. Venturi and Scott Brown had earlier written books on complexity and contradiction in architecture and on learning from Las Vegas. The extension is their best-known work in Europe.

• Postmodernism
• Robert Venturi