When the original architect, William Wilkins, designed this building
he designed it with an aperture in the ceiling of this gallery,
so that visitors could see up into the iconic dome,
but also so that light would filter down
from above and that was really important in a time before artificial lighting.
In 1847
the family of the famous neo-classical
artistj John Flaxman donated
a large body of work from the artist's studio
to UCL.
At the same time, UCL’s second architect, Thomas Donaldson,
was busy making modifications and additions
to William Wilkins’s original plan.
When the Flaxman Gallery was being created,
that oculus was covered over so that
the statue of St Michael could have a fitting place in the centre
of the Flaxman Gallery.
What this current design does is unite the best parts of
both of those earlier schemes so that St Michael
now stands on a glass plinth and is very much the centre of the
architectural composition of the Flaxman Gallery,
but you've got that visibility again, between
the ground floor and the first floor, and that sense of spaciousness and light,
and you’ve got this fabulous new exhibition space,
so we’ve really united the best of UCL’s
heritage with really contemporary 21st-century thought.
What we wanted was a space where we could
showcase some of UCl’s most wonderful
collections, but also somewhere we could highlight some of
our cutting-edge research, so it's kind of a dialogue between the past and the
present,
and a place where visitors really can get a feel for
what UCL thought about in the past and what we're thinking today.
In 1922, the statue of
St Michael overcoming Satan entered what we might call
a nomadic phase. In photographs from 1937
we see the sculpture out on the portico.
Leading up to its departure from the university
in 1972, when it went on long-term loan
along with other models to the V&A.
In 1941
the university in this particular site experienced
severe damage from bombing during the war. There was damage to the dome
and damage to the gallery.
The absence of St Michael from the gallery
in fact is what saved the sculpture. St Michael finally returned
in 1994.
We wanted to do this because previously this space was very much
a thorough-faire. It was just a space that people walked through on their way to
somewhere else,
and now I think it’s somewhere that's a real destination, it’s somewhere that
people can stop
and look and be inspired and
we really feel this is going to be a space that is going to change in reflecting UCL’s current
concerns,
a space which students are going to find really stimulating as well,
but also that visitors to UCL for the first time are going to get
a real feel for what UCL is about.