42 CONTEXT 185 : SEPTEMBER 2025 ALASDAIR TRAVERS and JON WRIGHT Conserving the postmodern legacy of the Sainsbury Wing The reopening of the Sainsbury Wing is more than a milestone for the National Gallery: it is a landmark moment for postmodern heritage and late-20th-century architecture. In the ever-evolving lexicon of heritage conservation, few buildings have so acutely tested our definitions of ‘significance’, ‘authorship’ and ‘adaptation’ as the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. As the landmark postmodern building reopens after a sensitive refurbishment by Selldorf Architects and Purcell, it invites a timely reappraisal, not only of its own legacy, but of the broader place of postmodernism in the UK’s architectural heritage landscape. Post-modern architecture, along with the concurrent hi-tech buildings that emerged from the discontents of late-modernism, are the styles currently under review as ‘historic’. There are a significant number of buildings of both styles now listed, ranging from cultural projects to offices and from university buildings to houses. Listing brings heritage protection but until changes are proposed, no listed building faces the challenges of conservation. The Sainsbury Wing, listed in 2018 at Grade I and one of the first postmodern buildings to be designated, sits therefore at the vanguard of conservation. The Sainsbury Wing is a test case, one that will inform and shape our future conservation approaches to the buildings of the recent past. From outlier to icon Commissioned in the aftermath of a contentious planning row in the 1980s, the Sainsbury Wing was designed by American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, leading figures of the postmodern movement. Their design responded pointedly to the context of Trafalgar Square, simultaneously referencing and subverting classical forms with wit and intellectual rigour. Constructed in 1988–91, the building was conceived as a distinct entrance and gallery suite for the National Gallery’s early renaissance paintings. It was, from the beginning, a building of contradictions: historically referential yet playfully irreverent, hierarchical in plan yet democratic in its planning ideology. Unlike the modernist orthodoxy it rejected, it aimed to be legible, accessible, even inviting. But by the 2010s, the Sainsbury Wing was showing its age – not materially, but functionally. Visitors struggled with its layout and lobby experience, and the demands of contemporary museum operation outstripped what the original plan could deliver. A range of new, well-meaning but ultimately unsympathetic additions in the form of desks and signage The National Gallery Sainsbury Wing seen from Trafalgar Square. The brief was to improve the visitor experience, enhance access and environmental performance, and reassert the wing as the gallery’s main entrance, all without compromising its postmodern identity. (All photos by Edmund Sumner, copyright the National Gallery, London)
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