National Portrait Gallery – ADC

Jamie Fobert Architects, in collaboration with Purcell and Max Fordham, has comprehensively reworked London’s National Portrait Gallery.

Photos

Olivier Hess, Jim Stephenson

Jamie Fobert Architects, working alongside heritage architect Purcell and environmental engineer Max Fordham, has completed the most significant redevelopment of London’s National Portrait Gallery in the Grade I-listed building’s 127-year history. Central to the scheme is an accessible entrance and public forecourt, which repurposes a previously underutilised area to the north of the gallery. The entrance has been created by transforming three of the original windows on the north façade intro four-metre-high doorways. Designed by Jamie Fobert Architects, the bronze entrance doors incorporate 45 specially commissioned bronze portraits of women by artist Tracey Emin.

The new entrance hall is more than double the size of the gallery’s original foyer. Price & Myers oversaw the removal of some of the original walls, as well the design of large beams to carry the load of the building above. Ensuring visitors encounter art as soon as they enter the building, the hall includes a presentation of historic and contemporary busts on plinths designed by Nissen Richards Studio.

Another key element is The Mildred and Simon Palley Learning Centre, which is designed to provide an improved learning experience for children, young people, community groups and adult learners. The centre has more than doubled the gallery’s provision for learners, increasing from one studio to three – The Law Photography Studio, The Art Studio and The Clore Studio – and incorporating a gallery space, state-of-the-art digital and photography equipment, and improved facilities, such as a lunchroom and a courtyard garden.

A complete restoration of the gallery spaces has also been integral to the project. Blocked windows have been opened, rooflights reinstated, and infilled arches reopened. The faded teak floors have been brought back to life and now have a deep lustre. Elsewhere, gallery ceilings have been restored and unified with a single colour. Lighting, which previously hung at the cornice level at the centre of each gallery, has been raised – to designs by Max Fordham – into the lanterns of the third floor galleries, enabling it to virtually disappear from view.

“The project was primarily driven by the desire for the Gallery to turn to face the city, to open up to the public in a way the original building did not, to bring back to life the gallery spaces, and to focus attention on the handsome Victorian architecture which had been obscured,” commented Jamie Fobert. “In all that we have done, we have been guided by the National Portrait Gallery’s Director, Dr Nicholas Cullinan, whose vision has been clear and consistent throughout. No longer awkward or overlooked, the National Portrait Gallery can now stand confidently facing the city: the great historic building Londoners never knew they had.”

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