Sainsbury Wing

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Sainsbury Wing
The National Gallery
St Martin's Street
West End, City of Westminster
London, September 2003

“The most important addition to the building in recent years has been the Sainsbury Wing, designed by the postmodernist architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to house the collection of Renaissance paintings, and built in 1991. The building occupies the ‘Hampton's site’ to the west of the main building, where a department store of the same name had stood until its destruction in the Blitz. The Gallery had long sought expansion into this space and in 1982 a competition was held to find a suitable architect; the shortlist included a radical high-tech proposal by Richard Rogers, among others. The design that won the most votes was by the firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, who then modified their proposal to include a tower, similar to that of the Rogers scheme. The proposal was dropped after the Prince of Wales compared the design to a ‘monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’, The term ‘monstrous carbuncle’, for a modern building that clashes with its surroundings, has since become commonplace.” (National Gallery, Wikipedia)