> located on the ground floor near the former cloakroom, halfway between the street entrance and the stairs and lift leading down to the basement. Three adjacent structural columns have needed to be retained.
That first link is spot on. Looking at the third image in the article, they are standing next to the destroyed column, and it is clearly one of the columns you indicated.
Architects' whimsy doesn't always "make sense" from a practical standpoint but often has some kind of reasoning behind it. In this case it's right there in the article - for purely aesthetic reasons, to invoke the sense of entering an underground "crypt" sort of space when the real treasures (the artworks themselves) lie on a floor above. Makes a little more sense when you know what the article doesn't obviously state, that the whole extension uses a lot of pastiche of ancient Egyptian style, Tutankhamen's tomb and all that, and that the street level entrance is lower than the original main entrance of the National Gallery itself.
In architecture, there is this phenomenon where people may have an irrational fear of collapse. Adding (the suggestion of) redundant structural support may take away that fear.
On the other hand, this comment reminds me of a project I started working on midway through, in London many years ago, demolishing and rebuilding an operational train station under a 20 storey building.
My first site meeting with the contractors we were standing across the street and looking at the massive new columns they installed on the side street holding the transfer beams for the building above. And I am not saying anything looking, just looking at the structurals and back at the building and counting the columns. Not wanting to make a fool of myself, but there was no way of avoiding it, but there was one more column on the structural drawings than on the building.
So I mentioned it, and the head contractor goes pale and cancels the meeting. The next time I went to site there was an extra column. Redundancy is not just there for phobias and earthquakes.
You triggered memories of being in the south tower observation deck with my feet a foot and a half from the window and my forehead braced against the glass, staring 1200 feet straight down.
for some reason this makes me think of gauls who purportedly believed that the sky was about to fall on their heads. now i imagine them lining all their roads with tree trunks and large stones, and wait, now i got the purpose of stonehenge. ;-)
It's disappointing to see you being downvoted for asking a genuine question. Such silly downvoting is pointless, counterproductive to conversation, and needs to stop.
https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cxgd3urn/production/0a733d1463e...