remember standing in the dark outside 6 Burlington
Gardens, escaping the hubbub of ‘Sensation’ at the
Royal Academy of Arts (RA), five minutes’ walk and
a world away. Peering out gloomily into the greyness
of late 1997, the building – home to the Museum of
Mankind for almost three decades – was now shuttered
up. It was a squarish slab of neoclassical architecture
in the high style. It had once been white. It was sparely
ornamented with statuary dedicated to British cultural
heroes and a few ‘illustrious foreigners’ accorded
(almost) equal status. Its columns and porticoes were
beautiful, but burly, Victorian approximations of
Hellenic originals, coarsened once by Roman tastes
before finally being given a dose of Anglo-Saxon heft.
Creatively, as an ethnographic offshoot of the
British Museum, the Museum of Mankind certainly had
its moments. As a destination space, it had been a dead
loss. It was a dead block in a deadening part of town.
Savile Row had never spilled round the corner and the
Albany, the apartment complex next door that had
been home to Basevi and Byron, kept its own counsel.
This was a building no one quite knew what to do with.
Or so it seemed. A tortuous two decades of planning
disagreements and false starts later, astonishing new
gallery spaces, a 250-seat double-height lecture theatre
that updates Epidaurus for the digital age, and for the
first time a splendid, adventurous physical connection
to the main RA building on Piccadilly will help create
a whole new cultural hub in the heart of the capital,
courtesy of the most in-demand art-world architect.
Burlington Gardens has all the signature elements
of David Chipperfield’s topology, which is to say, the
complete absence of signature. It’s what has made him,
along perhaps with Renzo Piano, the pre-eminent
shaper of cultural spaces today. After years of ebullient
art space architecture – often much hated by theartists themselves – there was demand for more rigour,
honesty and restraint. Chipperfield offers that in spades.
‘He is so good at context,’ agrees RA artistic director
Tim Marlow. ‘He doesn’t have a signature style but
can work interestingly in so many different styles. So
when you think about the Neues Museum in Berlin,
the Hepworth Wakefield, Turner Contemporary or
his museum for literature in Germany, you see he’s got
such breadth but there is a real rigour to him as well.
More than anything, he understands artists; I think
he would be very interesting to talk to about ways
of engaging with the space on a programming level.’
Chipperfield himself characterises projects such
as Burlington Gardens or the Neues Museum as
‘interventions’ and is happy to downplay their import.
No one, he says, will leave Burlington Gardens talking
about a David Chipperfield project, and that is exactly
as it should be. ‘I don’t think architecture should
be waving all the time,’ he says. ‘I mean there are some
times when it needs to be waving more than others.
If you are in an industrial site in the middle of
Wakefield and you’ve got to help rejuvenate a city that
has been beaten to bits, then you have to start waving
your hands a little more than you might do if you’re in
the middle of Berlin or London. But generally I think
the time for icons has passed. People are now rather
suspicious; they ask why is this building so expensive.
Museums had become confused with branding.’
All the same, his beautiful work at Burlington
Gardens is, if anything, even more radical than at the
Neues Museum. The interior certainly offered a less
promising palette than Berlin. It was a dull misto
of years and styles: all corridor and hallway, not nearly
as large as the façade made it appear. It had served
successively as space for the University of London, the
HQ of an ill-fated National Antarctic Expedition, »An early concept drawing
by Chipperfield shows the
new bridge that links the
Royal Academy’s original
Burlington House building
and the new Burlington
Gardens annex
Architecture
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