A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing had discovered an unusual time capsule embedded in a pillar they had been instructed to knock down. It contained a letter signed by Sir John Sainsbury, who, along with his brothers, had thrown the museum a £50 million lifeline to realise the extension in 1990; and clearly, he wasn’t happy with the way his money was being spent.
He expressed this with no small amount of elegance: ‘If you have found this note,’ his missive read, ‘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 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.’
Many visitors in the decades since might be inclined to go further. The Sainsbury Wing’s architects, the iconoclastic American husband-and-wife partnership Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, were a pair of brilliant minds who, it’s generally acknowledged, invented architectural postmodernism. Their gleeful fusion of historical styles and registers resulted in some weird and wonderful buildings, and some great soundbites. I remember reading, for example, that they had provoked each other into a creative mode with the phrase: ‘I bet you I can like something worse than you can like.’ What they did like, or at least professed to, was Las Vegas.
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