British Royal Academy announces 50 mln pound plan for redevelopment

The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) Monday announced a plan for a multi-million pound redevelopment project to be completed by 2018, the institution's 250th birthday.

Architect Sir David Chipperfield is leading the design project, and his scheme will for the first time link the RA home, the palatial 17th century Burlington Gardens on Piccadilly in central London, to Burlington Gardens, one of the grandest unrestored buildings in the city.

The RA is Britain's foremost artist-led institution, and is famed for its annual summer exhibition, the world's largest open submission exhibition of paintings.

The 50 million pound (77.9 million U.S. dollars) scheme will open up access to the Royal Academy Art School, Britain's oldest art school and the only one to offer a three-year, full-time post-graduate fine art course, and create new exhibition space and a lecture theater.

Projects Chipperfield has led on in the past include the restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. He also designed two of the newest art galleries to open in Britain -- the Hepworth Wakefield and the Turner Contemporary in Margate.

Chipperfield told journalists on a guided tour around the project that the details of the plan to link the RA with Burlington Gardens, which will pass through the RA Schools, had taken seven years.

Chipperfield said the question for the RA Schools had been whether the connection with the public was good or bad.

Standing in the RA Schools, Chipperfield said, "In theory, it is a fairly simple exercise to draw a red line that goes from there (the RA) through here and up there (Burlington Gardens). But it has taken seven years to negotiate that. And it is a serious point because the schools have existed here and enjoyed it."

Chipperfield said the RA Schools would lose some of its privacy but would gain a public gallery.

Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the RA, said, "That's always been a key aspiration, so that people know and understand that part of the Academy is an art school.

"There is a downside, in that they lose some of their complete privacy, but there is an upside. They are more understood, more part of the culture of art schools in London and the gallery will show their work."

Saumarez Smith said the RA would remain open for exhibitions during the building project.

Earlier this year, Chipperfield's firm David Chipperfield Architects was selected to develop a new design for the modern and contemporary art wing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The RA was founded in 1768 by British monarch George the Third. Endit