National Portrait Gallery
by Jamie Fobert Architects and Purcell
Client National Portrait Gallery
Award RIBA London Award 2024
London’s National Portrait Gallery, situated off Trafalgar Square, has undergone a significant transformation aimed at enhancing the visitor experience and revitalising its historic spaces.
Jamie Fobert Architects’ key interventions include a new public entrance and forecourt, a learning centre, and repurposing existing office spaces into public space. Refurbished historical elements of the Grade I listed building are seamlessly blended with contemporary design. Providing a more welcoming and accessible space for visitors, the new entrance also symbolically reorientates the Gallery towards the vibrant neighbourhood to the north, which the previous entrance turned its back against. It involved the careful alteration of original windows to form new doorways, retaining cut marks at the doorway bases to express the alterations.
The new learning centre is located underneath the bridge that links the forecourt to this entrance across a basement void, allowing it to benefit from natural light and an enclosed courtyard.
Read the full citation from the RIBA Awards Jury on RIBA Journal.
Contractor Gilbert Ash
Environmental / M&E Engineer Max Fordham LLP
Structural Engineer Price & Myers
Wayfinding and Donor Recognition Holmes Wood
Interpretation Designer Nissen Richards Studio
Retail Designer Alex Cochrane Architects
Project Management Gardiner & Theobald
Quantity Surveyor / Cost Consultant Turner & Townsend
Access Consultant David Bonnett Associates
Fire Consultant OFR
Planning Consultant Lichfields
Exhibition Lighting ZNA
Gross internal area in m² 10102
