__NOTOC__ 6 Burlington Gardens is a Grade II*-listed building in

Mayfair Mayfair is an area of Westminster, London, England, in the City of Westminster. It is in Central London and part of the West End. It is between Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly and Park Lane and one of the most expensive districts ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. Built for the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

, it has been used by various institutions in the course of its history, including the Civil Service Commission, the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

and, currently, the

Royal Academy of Arts The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House in Piccadilly London, England. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its ...

History

University of London and the Civil Service Commission

The

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century It ...

building was designed by Sir James Pennethorne between 1867 and 1870 as headquarters for the University of London. It occupied the northernmost section of the former garden of Burlington House. It was a grand building, but not especially large. The University of London is a federal university and this early central building contained little besides examination halls and a few offices; the premises of several of the constituent colleges were larger. The university vacated Burlington Gardens in 1900 for the Imperial Institute building in South Kensington. Briefly the headquarters of the National Antarctic Expedition, in 1902 it was given to the Civil Service Commission.

Museum of Mankind

In 1970, this was the site of the Department of Ethnography of the

, which housed its collections from the Americas, Africa, the Pacific and Australia, as well as tribal Asia and Europe, because of lack of space in the museum's main building in

Bloomsbury Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London, part of the London Borough of Camden in England. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural institution, cultural, intellectual, and educational ...

. Between 1970 and 1997, the building, as the Museum of Mankind, hosted around 75 exhibitions, including many famous ones such as ''Nomad and City'', 1976, and ''Living Arctic'', 1987. It was created by Keeper of Ethnography Adrian Digby in the 1960s, and opened by his successor William Fagg. Fagg was succeeded by Malcolm Mcleod in 1974, and by John Mack in 1990. The museum ceased exhibiting at Burlington Gardens in 1997 and the Department of Ethnography moved back to the British Museum in Bloomsbury in 2004.

Royal Academy and private tenants

After the ethnography collection's return to Bloomsbury the building was purchased by the Royal Academy. In 1998 an architectural competition was held to connect it with Burlington House, which was won by Michael Hopkins & Partners. This was abandoned as the Heritage Lottery Fund was not persuaded that there was sufficient need for the project, which would have cost £80 million. In about 2005 the building was brought back into use by the Royal Academy, the tenant of the original wing of Burlington House and the wing which lies between the two buildings. It was used mainly by the Royal Academy Schools. On 29 August 2006, the building was damaged by a fire, but there was no loss of academy artworks as it was being prepared for a future exhibition. Giampietrino-Last-Supper-ca-1520

In 2006

Colin St John Wilson Sir Colin Alexander St John Wilson, Royal Institute of British Architects, FRIBA, Royal Academy, RA, (14 March 1922 – 14 May 2007) was an English architect, lecturer and author. With his partner MJ Long, Wilson spent over 30 years progressing t ...

drew up a masterplan for the whole complex, which included a more modest link between the buildings than that proposed by Hopkins. However, Wilson died the following year, which led to another competition being held in 2008, won by David Chipperfield Architects. In order to raise capital for Chipperfield's design, the building was lent to the commercial gallery Haunch of Venison, which occupied the site from 2009 to 2011 while their existing building was being renovated. In 2012 space in the building was lent to the Pace Gallery, which occupies it on a 15-year lease. A second application to the HLF for £12.7m to go towards a £36 million project, was successful in 2013. This included a sculpture court in the bridge between the buildings, a lecture hall where that of the University of London originally stood and a permanent home for Giampietrino’s full-size copy of

Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested o ...

’s '' Last Supper''. The redevelopment was completed in 2018, in time for the academy's 250th anniversary that year.

References

External links