The subtly radical transformation of London’s Royal Academy

The cast hall of the Royal Academy Schools is a space of classical fragments. Under its long vaulted ceiling, dusty, yellowing copies of Greek, Roman and Renaissance sculptures with rippling torsos and occasional missing limbs or noses punctuate what is the spine of a working art school. It was always hidden from public view yet at the heart of the Academy. Now visitors will cross that corridor as they walk through the Academy’s £56m expansion and, for the first time, they will get a glimpse of the institution that always formed its invisible core.

The corridor is also a useful metaphor for the new project, a major addition and reconfiguring which has bonded two buildings together in a mostly successful attempt to create a coherent collection of spaces running through a deep, difficult and dense city block.

The Royal Academy is an independent charitable organisation run by its academicians. It revolves around the remains of a 17th-century house reconfigured by dilettante architect Lord Burlington in the early 18th century. The new wing is known as Burlington Gardens, which is exactly what was here — Burlington’s gardens, at the rear of the site. The site’s current occupant was opened in 1870, a monumental Victorian heap designed as the headquarters of the University of London. It has had a chequered and unsettled history, including stints as the Civil Service Commission and the British Museum’s anthropological wing, the Museum of Mankind. This latter I hazily remember as an impressive and unlikely series of spaces punctuated by totem poles, masks and canoes. It is a rather pompous Victorian place with a memorable staircase and, until now, not much else.

Fortunately, the two buildings, back to back, are almost symmetrical along a central axis, their entrances almost directly aligned. Unfortunately, to get from one to the other, the visitor needs to go upstairs, downstairs, over a bridge, through the schools and an old storage vault before arriving in front of an understairs cupboard in the old RA.

This is, in its own way, a curious counterpart to Burlington Arcade, the other, parallel route through the block. If Burlington Arcade is the slick, commercial, covered cut-through of luxury consumables, the Royal Academy’s route is a wander through the history of London’s classical architecture, from its Palladian emergence through over-stuffed Victorian, Georgian stately home, Italianate gallery and courtyard and grand Edwardian.

The architect of the expansion, David Chipperfield, has somehow had to join these two discrete buildings and the historical narrative and create a coherent interior. Mostly, he has succeeded.

The most obvious additions are the impressive new galleries. The Royal Academy was previously a place of temporary exhibitions with little reason to visit in between. Now it has a Collections Gallery housing its hugely impressive works, including a contemporary copy of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” (painted in 1506 by a student in the studio and now, with the degradation of the original, an important piece of evidence) and the Michelangelo “Taddei Tondo”, which had always been one of my favourite artworks in London, long rather overlooked at the top of the stairs to the Sackler Gallery. Beside these, in the long, lovely top-lit rooms which were once the University of London’s laboratories, are the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries. These are very fine art spaces, with real character and power of their own. For the impressive opening show, Tacita Dean has chosen to screen the rooflights but this will surely become one of London’s most desirable art spaces.

It is a remarkable opening up of a major building and the creation of a very significant new public space

Architecture also finds, for the first time, a permanent presence in the institution. Although nominally on an equal footing with art, architecture has always seemed rather repressed in the Academy. Chipperfield makes the point that when architects used to draw, their works could be hung beside those of the artists, but now the disciplines have diverged so much they need to justify their presence in the Academy. If this can be done, it will be done in the (rather diminutive) Architecture Studio looking out over Old Burlington Street. Beside this, a grand new bar and café is intended to draw life up into the building. There is a major new auditorium (The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre), something the old RA conspicuously lacked.

Perhaps the most important aspect of all the changes is that visitors will be able to move through the Academy free of charge, visiting galleries as they go without ticketing. It is a remarkable opening up of a major building and the creation of a very significant new public space in what would be one of the world’s most valuable slices of real estate.

The architecture is more repair than statement. It is a threading through of routes between contesting functions and the compromises it makes are, in a way, where the architecture emerges. The pivotal point is the concrete-encased Weston Bridge which spans the gap between Burlington Gardens and the Academy School. With its combination of stairs and window, it has something of a Bridge of Sighs about it, yet remains invisible from the outside as it looks down on the still-private yard of the art school.

The interventions otherwise have their volume knobs turned right down. There is tasteful terrazzo and pale, smooth concrete, almost indistinguishable shades of light grey. The meticulous retention and restoration of even the most worn original surfaces imparts a sensuous texture to the spaces, a sense of time and the traces of long inhabitation. In fact it is deceptive. The grand brick vaults which now house the rather gruesome remnants of historic anatomical studies appeared, only a couple of years ago, like the spaces beneath a railway, encrusted in dirt and cabling; they have now been partly (and expensively) excavated to make them larger and loftier. Bricks that were once grimy are now caked in a creamy layer of foundation, richly grained in beige and beautifully lit so they appear theatrical and seductive.

Visitors are also brought through the delightfully ad hoc spaces of the schools, including more north-lit galleries displaying the students’ work. Heavily engineered in riveted steel, with metal roofs, plates and beams, these odd, cobbled-together spaces, which were never meant to be seen except by students and staff, are now among the most memorable moments.

“In a few years,” Chipperfield says, “you’d really want it to look as if it had always been this way, so that people wouldn’t remember if this space or that door had always been there or not.” It’s something that’s true of conservation architecture, a field in which the sign of maximum success is invisibility. But that is a slightly unfashionable way of making cultural architecture, an arena that seems to demand a statement. This is instead a grown-up, careful and clever integration of the fragments of some wonderful, and some rather less wonderful architecture. It embodies a series of paradoxes, an invisible transformation, an informal ceremonial route and a redesign that is as subtle as it is radical.

royalacademy.org.uk