A decades-old letter has been found at the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing, in which donor John Sainsbury calls its false columns "a mistake" of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
The letter, which was found last year as the wing was undergoing work for its controversial revamp by Selldorf Architects, was written by Sainsbury, one of the wing's funders, reported The Art Newspaper.
Hidden inside one of two concrete non-structural columns in the wing's foyer, it anticipated their demolition and criticised their design.
The letter, written by Sainsbury on July 26, 1990, states:
"If you have found this note 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." Columns "unnecessary" according to Sainsbury
The columns were a part of the architects' postmodern design for the wing, which saw Venturi and Scott Brown take the forms and columns of the 19th-century neoclassical National Gallery, but slowly reduce the elements.
The Sainsbury Wing won the 25 Year Award from the American Institute of Architects in 2019 and is seen as one of the most prominent examples of postmodern architecture in the UK.
However, Sainsbury, who dropped the plastic folder-encased letter into a column while the building work for the w...