If buildings could speak, would they always object to their demolition? In the case of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, now undergoing a controversial redevelopment, a voice from the grave heartily approves of the arrival of the wrecking ball.
It has emerged that, during the demolition of a pair of columns in the gallery’s foyer last year, a letter from the major donor Lord Sainsbury was discovered in a plastic folder, hidden inside one of the columns. The note outlines his fierce objection to the existence of these false pillars, which served no structural purpose, and expresses his delight at their removal.
“If you have found this note,” says Sainsbury in his letter, dated 26 July 1990, and typed entirely in capital letters on his supermarket’s headed paper, “you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery.
“I believe that the false columns are a mistake of the architect,” he continues, “and that we would live to regret our accepting this detail of his design. Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary columns.”
Sainsbury died in 2022, but his sense of joy in this posthumous vindication is palpable. His widow, Anya, was present when the note was removed, and placed in the galley’s archive for posterity. “I was so happy for John’s letter to be rediscovered after all these years,” she told the Art Newspaper, “and I feel he would be relieved and delighted for the gallery’s new plans and the extra space they are creating.”
At the time, Sainsbury wasn’t the only one to raise his eyebrows at the playful postmodern design, produced by the Philadelphia practice of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Opened in 1991, the project was met with a lukewarm critical reception from British critics. Verdicts ranged from “a vulgar American piece of postmodern mannerist pastiche” to “picturesque mediocre slime”. It was too traditional for modernists, too experimental for traditionalists. And just too glib for the po-faced English art world.
The intellectual east coast architects had done their best to navigate a political-aesthetic minefield. The site had originally been slated for a glassy modernist extension by the British hi-tech firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek after it won a competition for the work in 1982. That design was swiftly scrapped after being denounced in a career-ending speech by the then Prince of Wales, who called it “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend”. Keen to appease establishment tastes, the museum hired Venturi Scott Brown to produce something more contextually sensitive. The result was a project that has since earned plaudits as one of the most sophisticated pieces of postmodern architecture in the country.
