Downstairs in the Dixon Jones office, some of the practice’s 29 young architects are beavering away on the final touches to their National Gallery Portico project, the transformation of the gallery’s main entrance on Trafalgar Square, which will reopen after a year’s closure on Saturday. Others are working on a £100-million office block in York Way near King’s Cross which will also house an art gallery, a concert hall, restaurants and rehearsal space for musical ensembles. And then there’s a hotel in Oxford, housing and educational schemes in Kensington & Chelsea, a new national portrait gallery in Canada, the second phase of the Said Business School in Oxford, a London hotel awaiting approval, a project in Liverpool, and the Exhibition Road scheme to rethink the roads and pedestrian spaces around South Kensington Tube station.
Up in their eyrie, the two men who have built up the practice, Dixon Jones Architects, share a modest room, their desks set side by side in front of a wall of shelves crammed with books, postcards, architectural models, interesting bits of stone, photographs and old boxes of slides. In its frank untidiness and lack of luxury it is a far cry from the minimalist glass and steel workspaces of Lord Rogers or Lord Foster. But Dixon Jones has beaten those two titans of the architectural world to a few major projects in recent years, and they have begun to make their own significant and enduring mark on the fabric of Central London.
In 1998 they were appointed masterplanners for the development of the National Gallery, with a brief to rethink the ground floor. A year ago, they opened the new East Wing entrance, giving on to a modern box lined with black marble and a staircase up to the main galleries. Now in the central portico entrance they have restored the superb 19th-century decorative ceiling by J.D. Crace and the pink marble walls in the staircase hall, and also created a modernist entrance area designed to house new ticketing facilities and all the other essential amenities of contemporary museum visiting. “We’ve done a modern kind of restoration and a recovery of the Crace interior,” says Jones. “The really difficult part is when the old and the new intervention have to come together. We just hope and pray that it works.” Early indications from the critics are that it has worked magnificently.
If you were to stand on the roof of the National Gallery you could easily identify a clutch of other Dixon Jones redevelopments, for the square mile around it is known in the corridors of culture as Dixon-Jonesville. First on the list comes the The Royal Opera House, where they steered a £120-million redevelopment to completion over 17 years. When it finally opened in 2000, they had worked with and seen off three prime ministers, six arts ministers, three Arts Council chairmen, six general directors, five chairmen of the board, three technical directors and four project managers.
Then in 1994 they won the competition to do a major redevelopment of the National Portrait Gallery. Their ambitious scheme required a deal to swap space with the neighbouring National Gallery. With the two enlightened directors, Charles Saumarez Smith, then director of the NPG, and Neil MacGregor, then director of the National Gallery, the deal came off, and Dixon and Jones were able to insert a modernist white cube inside the NPG, giving it a principal foyer space leading up to the main suite of top-lit galleries and a top-floor restaurant with an incomparable view over Central London.
Then came Somerset House, where in 2000 they made a tactful intervention, opening up the terrace, designing a café and building access to it from Waterloo Bridge. They also transformed its grand courtyard by adding squirting fountains which lure children and adults alike and generally contribute to the jollity of the city.
“London has had a lot of projects making use of Lottery funds, but nearly all of them have been to do with giving new life to existing buildings,” says Dixon. “You contrast that with Paris where the grands projets have all been new buildings. There it is to do with grand gestures, but in London it is much more evolutionary.”
The contrast between the creative informality of their working environment and the polished clarity of their buildings is interesting. You feel you can tap these buildings and they will ring like bells. In each case they have preserved the best of the old, giving the venerable its own share of the action while improving the whole with new modernist spaces, and packing in the technical requirements so that the lives of their buildings are extended. This is not radical or subversive architecture. This is conciliatory modern architecture in which boldness is balanced with discretion.
The big turning point for the pair’s careers came in 1984 when Dixon, in collaboration with Bill Jack of Building Design Partnership, won the competition for the redevelopment of the Royal Opera House. Jones, who had been working with Dixon in the Seventies, had moved to Canada, and was to rejoin the partnership a few years later. “The competition was incredibly testing,” recalls Dixon. “It started with 150 entries, and was gradually whittled down in five stages to just two, each time demanding new presentations. Richard Rogers was the other finalist, and I reckoned we didn’t have the faintest hope of winning, so I went to the final presentation feeling rather light-headed. He was very, very annoyed when he lost because he absolutely expected to win.” He chuckles at the memory.
Jones rejoined Dixon in 1989 just as building work was beginning. “I was going through a dreadful crisis,” says Dixon. “My marriage [to Fenella Dixon, also his professional partner] had broken down. My family life and my professional life were both falling apart. Everything was disappearing from under my feet. I just didn’t know what to do, and someone suggested I ring Ed. We hadn’t been in touch for a year, but I found his number and rang him, but he was engaged. I rang the number again a few minutes later, and it was engaged again. Then my phone rang and it was Ed. He’d been trying to get through on the phone to see if he could come over and join me in the practice.”
Jones had won a major competition to build the Mississauga City Hall, Ontario, which had been completed in 1987. “I could see a recession looming and I’d been offered a teaching post at Princeton, but my wife, who is Canadian, didn’t want to bring up our children in America. I didn’t know what to do, so I rang Jeremy. It was very odd indeed that we rang each other at the same time after such a long time out of touch.”
Together they rode the waves of political manoeuvrings around the Royal Opera House, obstructive committees and subcommittees, judicial reviews, interventions from the Prince of Wales, the assertiveness of the Royal Fine Art Commission, English Heritage and the Covent Garden Community Association. “All this, without temper or tantrum, the architects put up with,” recalls Jeremy Isaacs, director from 1988-1997. “Whatever was suggested to them, I never saw Jeremy or Edward lose his cool. They just nodded and pondered and went away and came back with a new version.”
