National Portrait Gallery £41.3m makeover review – a breath of fresh air

The National Portrait Gallery is a hybrid, a mongrel, a compromise – part Prado, part Madame Tussauds, a place to admire art and gawp at famous names. It’s a combination that might deprive it of the highest levels of grandeur, but grants some freedoms. The gallery can speak to audiences that are attracted by the personalities on show, and by appreciation of painting and sculpture. Its mixed-up nature allows it to be more relaxed and less reverential than pure temples of art.

Its building, which first opened in 1896, is also a compromise, glommed as it is on to the back of the National Gallery, an institution with which it used to have a fractious sibling rivalry, filling in odd spaces in their shared block. Its L-shaped plan is an expedient add-on, like the sort of big air ducts you see strapped to the roofs of kebab houses, even as it makes an outward show of classical dignity and symmetry. It is a grand piece of cultural plumbing.

This building has been the subject of several makeovers over the years, as architects armed with their metaphorical plungers and wrenches and One Shot drain cleaner have sought to unblock its passages and junctions. Of these, the latest and most extensive, which opened last week after £41.3m of expenditure, promises to be the most successful. It is a collaborative work of many hands: the team includes the architect Jamie Fobert, who previously performed similar services for Tate St Ives and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, the heritage experts Purcell, the exhibition designers Nissen Richards, the environmental engineers Max Fordham and the contractors Gilbert-Ash.

The biggest move is to reposition the main entrance. The old one was at the side, a setup that made for an oddly low-key and obscure arrival, apparently so that it could be as near as possible to Trafalgar Square, rather than face the less salubrious districts of Soho and Seven Dials to the north. Now it faces towards those formerly feared areas, the perception and reality of their Hogarthian chaos having receded.

This new arrangement allows a public space to be reshaped in front of it, with sturdy but graceful seating in curved granite, a relocated and reoriented statue of the actor-manager Henry Irving, and an air of asymmetric dignity. The new entrance is fitted with bronze doors into which are cast 45 portraits of women drawn by Tracey Emin, to counter the over-representation of men in the gallery’s collection. It gives meaning to the arched and rusticated facade that it penetrates, by the gallery’s original architect Ewan Christian, that was formerly incidental and unnoticed, all dressed up as a Florentine palazzo but with nowhere much to go. These repositionings also make sense of the accidental relationship of the gallery to the thoroughfare that runs towards and past it, Charing Cross Road.

It enables a simple and direct access into the heart of the building, step free if that’s what you like or need, through a stony and uncluttered hall, furnished with a cluster of busts on plinths, to a reception desk in the high atrium created in the last big makeover, by the architects Dixon Jones, in 2000. From here you can head off in different directions into the collection, with the help of an escalator installed by the latter, an 1890s staircase, or lifts. Or you can stay on ground level and get quickly to some art, in newly made exhibition spaces there.

There’s a general determination to open spaces up, to let them breathe, to give a sense of connection with the outside. Bricked up doors and windows are returned to use, such that the shop, for example, is now a bright, high-ceilinged, arched space. The artistry of Max Fordham goes both into designing air-handling systems such that you don’t notice they are there and installing state-of-the-art glass that lowers daylight to levels that don’t damage the exhibits, while still giving you views of trees and sky.

There’s a desire to make the right decisions in the right places. Care has gone into the display cases and the labelling of exhibits, so that there’s minimal interruption between exhibit and viewer. Video screens are nicely judged, ensuring they don’t intrude on the art. Fobert has designed elegant purpose-built seats with sinuous armrests, so that it’s easy to lift yourself out of them. He also complements the mosaic floors that Ewan Christian put in the circulation spaces with modern versions, where small uneven squares of marble are placed in slightly irregular rows, like ordered falls of mineral blossom. There are nice architectural moments, such as a generous three-sided stair in levitating mass concrete, that leads down to an enlarged education centre in the basement; also, some revived hemi-rotondas and portals from the original building.

The new designs are respectful but not insipid. They create a loose armature both for the art and for the array of refurbished rooms in which they are displayed. One, on the first floor, is long and broad and bright, like the galleries you get in Elizabethan mansions. On the floor above, Nissen Richards has implemented a punchy colour scheme of blue, red, green and purple that make the galleries into sequences of energised drawing rooms.

Here the designers exploit the freedoms that the National Portrait Gallery’s ambiguous nature enables – it’s hard to imagine, in other national institutions, great old art being placed on such strong backgrounds, but it works. So too does the new hang, with its bold but well-judged assemblies of paintings, sculptures and photographs. One of the powers of portraiture is that you are usually one degree of separation from the subject: she or he was in the same room as the object that is in the room you are now in. The refurb and the rehang, without gurning and ingratiating and over-interpretation, allow you to feel that.

It’s still a wandering, eclectic and occasionally confusing experience, without an overarching architectural intent or big statement, a bit like roaming an eccentric stately home. Short of knocking it all down and starting again, this will always be the case. But the new look National Portrait Gallery is, given its constraints, about as good as it can be.

• The National Portrait Gallery is open now