The cruel and unusual punishment that the poor old National Portrait Gallery has suffered over its lifetime amounts to a sort of architectural torture. When it opened in 1896, architect Ewan Christian presented London with a great Florentine palazzo (with a Byzantine chapel-like staircase attached) to tell the story of a nation in its imperial pomp. Yet its rooms were soon divided and divided again, ceilings were lowered, floors raised, their decorative mosaics hidden.
Worse was what happened to the galleries’ lighting. Originally open only in the daytime with no artificial lights, the NPG was full of windows and skylights. Pragmatics, infills, changing fashion, and the threat of wartime bombing saw skylights painted over, windows permanently shuttered or entirely bricked up and their architraves removed. To add injury to insult, it was bombed nonetheless.
While the Tudors were resplendent in their year 2000 upper gallery, by architects Dixon Jones, the rest of the building was a dingy gentleman’s club by the millennium, where has-beens peered out from the walls through the gloom. Lifts stopped short and steps were everywhere – an unwelcoming access nightmare. The national story it told was a stuffy one – the hang and artwork captioning providing half-truths in Coles Notes form.
That world of hurt and pain has lifted with an extraordinary remodelling by a team led by architect Jamie Fobert, which sheds light into dark places. Only by head-scratching examination of Christian’s original drawings could the team begin to hazard what was hidden behind old layers. Now, along with the magic touch of heritage architects Purcell and bold engineering, windows have been unblocked, skylights freed, broken architraves mended and scarred terrazzo healed.
It doesn’t quite let the sunshine in but technically clever ‘scrim’ veils over openings, combined with clever cabinetry by exhibition designers Nissen Richards, allow more delicate works to brave the rediscovered daylight amid a rehanging that leads you gently on through the colourful upper galleries, where the previous cruciform plan has been reinstated.
The NPG had a difficult start in life, sited where the Victorians deliberately drove Charing Cross Road through the slums north of the National Gallery. This governed the strange placement of its entrance. Not wanting to face the demi-monde but instead flag its connections to the salubrious south, the too-small entryway was placed awkwardly on the side, where Charing Cross Road kinks.
And this is where Jamie Fobert Architects has literally turned things around. A new northside entrance facing up CXR has been created leading from a municipal triangle of leftover land. The reorientated granite square now bridges a deep lightwell to a new entrance formed by dropping three of Christian’s windows to form a titanic threshold. The bronze doors themselves are finished with Tracey Emin drawings of women, countering the honour previously given only to male artists in the building’s decoration.
Inside, massive walls and mezzanines have been removed and temporary galleries relocated to allow a flow past Nissen Richard’s stylish monochrome display of busts into the retained but enlarged escalator hall that remains the central circulation space. 950 sq m of new public space has been carved out. CXR’s curves, the NPGs monogram, and Christian’s characteristic chamfered corners have each informed details including gallery benches and balustrades.
It is the renewed connection to the city outside, however, that is transformative. Instead of fatigue-inducing hermetic gallery boxes, there are paintings in animated dialogue with each other and views out to London planes, leaves shifting in the breeze. With one bound, the NPG has been freed.
