Inside the revamped Royal Academy
The Royal Academy is hoping that its major, 250th-anniversary revamp will usher it into the cultural super league. We take a first look
Royal Academy ★★★★★
‘We’re nearly finished,” laughs the British architect David Chipperfield. At least, I think that’s what he says: it’s hard to tell above the din engulfing 6 Burlington Gardens, the Grade Ii*-listed edifice in Mayfair that Chipperfield has finally connected with Burlington House, home to the Royal Academy of Arts, after a decade-long campaign.
Around us, workers in hard hats toil noisily, hammering, drilling, scrubbing. The banisters of the grand staircase of this opulent Italianate building – constructed on the former gardens of the Earl of Burlington’s Palladian mansion on Piccadilly – are still wrapped in protective pink foam. Nearby, a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo is shrouded in plastic sheeting, as though to protect her modesty.
Yet, Chipperfield assures me, the RA’S new two-acre “campus”, which has increased the institution’s footprint by 70per cent, at a cost of £56million, will open to the public on schedule this Saturday, as part of the celebrations marking its 250th anniversary.
Ever since 2001, when it acquired the 19th-century structure to its rear, the RA has dreamed of linking it to Burlington House. On paper, it seems so simple: the two buildings abut one another, while their entrances are almost exactly aligned. Yet, over the years, concocting a master plan to satisfy the various factions of the Royal Academy – including, of course, the opinionated Academicians – proved elusive. Two – Michael Hopkins and Colin St John Wilson – had already tried, before Chipperfield took over.
One thorny issue was what to do with the RA Schools, where fine-art students have, until now, gone about their business out of sight, in a suite of studios at the back of Burlington House. Chipperfield came to view this contested strip of land in between the two buildings as a “demilitarised zone”; it is now a landscaped courtyard that the public will see, but not enter.
It’s one example of the significant amount of energy he has had to expend on diplomacy. “Bricks are one thing, people are another,” he says. “The RA is a robust institution, and people tend to say what they think.”
One eye-catching addition is the Weston Bridge, a concrete walkway that connects the two buildings and the keystone of a new thoroughfare stretching all the way from Burlington Gardens to Piccadilly. Of necessity, its route is not sleek and true, but stop-start. Visitors cross the bridge, encountering small galleries at either end, before cutting through the principle corridor of the RA Schools. They then descend into the vaults beneath the RA’S main galleries, before re-emerging into the daylight of Burlington House’s entrance hall. Chipperfield concedes that the trajectory is “down-vale, over-hill”, but arguably, his piecemeal route befits perfectly the complexities of an institution with so many jostling parts, and a fabulously zany history.
Meanwhile, the vaults provide an atmospheric space in which to show works from the RA’S permanent collection of 46,000 items. The first display focuses on the history of the Schools, and includes, appropriately for such a sepulchral setting, three grisly “écorchés”, ie anatomical models of flayed human figures, cast from the corpses of criminals. There are also immaculate drawings by John Everett Millais, who enrolled as a (very) precocious 11-year-old in 1840, when he was known as “the Child”, and who, 56 years later, ended up as president.
A considerable challenge has been how to ensure that Burlington Gardens is properly integrated, with its own purposeful identity, rather than a deluxe “dustbin” for stuff nobody wanted. To this end, Chipperfield has renovated a suite of three galleries for ticketed temporary shows. The Italian architect Renzo Piano (who designed The Shard) will be honoured there in the autumn, but first up is an exhibition by contemporary artist Tacita Dean, which unfortunately feels like overkill, because she recently opened two other high-profile shows at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery.
Elsewhere, a large gallery will show off previously hidden works by famous Academicians, including Constable, Gainsborough, Lawrence, and the RA’S first president, Reynolds. Most exciting of all, though, is a new lecture theatre. A horseshoe of 250 steeply raked seats, elegantly fashioned from darkened oak, this auditorium is magnificent: intimate yet, I suspect, capable of generating the electric atmosphere of a bullring. The first general assembly of Academicians in the auditorium will take place on May 31, while a “Festival of Ideas” is slated for September.
Of course, the biggest question is not whether Chipperfield’s design is any good, but why the RA has taken so much trouble to expand at such expense. Acquiring so much space, says Chipperfield, an Academician himself, initially threw the institution into “crisis”: “What should we do with it?”
The fact was, the Academy had to evolve if it hoped to secure its future for another two and a half centuries. The museum sector in London is cut-throat competitive. Annually, almost six million people visit the British Museum – many of them tourists. Likewise, Tate Modern, which unveiled an epic extension two years ago. The Royal Academy, though, is not a destination for international culture seekers in the same way. Privately funded, it relies for income upon footfall to temporary exhibitions.
The “new” RA, then, is a reboot. According to Charles Saumarez Smith, its secretary and chief executive, it has “transformed itself into a 21st-century museum-going experience”, offering a year-round programme as well as attractive social spaces, cafés and bars, which the public can use. “We hope to go from one star in the Michelin Guide for cultural tourists, as it were, to two or three,” he says.
Fine – but the most exciting new element is still that lecture theatre, in part because it has one eye on the RA’S history, as well as its future. Originally, the Academy was an indispensable forum for vigorous debate. Rather than merely functioning as a members’ club for artists past their prime, or a setting for glitzy blockbusters and the hardy perennial that is the Summer Exhibition, this is what it must strive to be again: an active force capable of shaping the arts in this country, encouraging excellence and provoking new ideas. Thanks to Chipperfield, this promised land is within reach.
Information: 020 7300 8090; royalacademy.org.uk