When the Neue Galerie opened in 2001, your restoration was praised for having a light touch. It’s ironic, then, that your interventions at the Frick, San Diego, and the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing have elicited such criticism. Why this scrutiny?

When the building completed by Carrère & Hastings in 1911 was purchased privately by a patron for the Neue Galerie, it was quite run-down. Nevertheless, its architecture has some distinction. We worked on it only with our clients. And we got to make decisions. One big decision, for example, was to have the building be accessible. Believe it or not, that was almost an option at the time. Any­way, nobody had any expectations of it. The architects were dead, as was the previous owner, Serge Sabarsky, who in an earlier iteration had suggested taking out the central staircase to create more space.

The interesting thing with adaptive reuse is you get to know buildings, existing buildings, as if they were people. And you discover their weaknesses and their strengths. In that dialogue, you talk to the building as it was. What does it need to deliver in its new incarnation? Many times, especially with public buildings, the requirements are more focused on delivering some service to the people who come visit rather than keeping [the structures] as untouched monuments.

In other words, you have to be kind to everybody. But you also have to understand how people will use the renovated and expanded project, in terms of circulation and activities, and how all that is a part of the whole. You need to find a path, a balance. Actually, I do everything with a light touch, not because I think about it that way, but because balance to me means handling it in a gentle way.

Selldorf Architects’ proposal for London’s National Gallery. Image courtesy Selldorf Architects

The first polemical project you were involved in was your redesign of the Venturi Scott Brown [VSB] addition to the San Diego museum, right?

By the way, after I gave a lecture in San Diego at the start of the project, Mosher & Drew wrote me to say how excited the firm was about the changes ahead.

You encountered Carrère & Hastings’s architecture again with the Frick Collection. Yet this time people objected to certain aspects of your design.

The Frick is a profoundly beautiful place. At face value, it functioned incredibly well for most visitors. It didn’t function that well in certain key aspects—such as welcoming visitors inside so they do not have to queue in the rain but come inside and have a large enough reception hall, where they could purchase tickets, or meet their friends. We looked very carefully at what works and what doesn’t work. We needed to provide some crucial amenities, such as letting people who require a wheelchair come and enter through the same front door as everyone else.

Selldorf Architects’ proposal for the Frick Collection. Image courtesy Selldorf Architects

You also provide a loading dock and office space for museum staff that isn’t in an attic with no air-conditioning.

I’m so glad that you pointed that out, because I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking, “This is not possible.” None of these interventions are willful acts or a gestural imposition on our part.

People also forget that there were four other proposals before yours over a period of 20 years—notably the Davis Brody Bond scheme, which would have inserted a six-story addition in the Russell Page garden.

A lot of it is just people making noise. I’m not a trained preservationist, but I sure as hell know good spaces. I sure as hell understand how people circulate, and how you can make connections that leave visitors with a coherent experience, and how you make mechanical systems work in spaces that weren’t meant to have the kind of sophisticated setup we require nowadays. Many of the people who have complained about the Frick did so because they were neighbors and didn’t want to have construction for two years.

People objected to the removal of the round music room. You can get upset about this removal of some original fabric. But what you get in return is tremendous. Of all the spaces in the building, the music room was in the way of connecting the library with the collection. These changes enable us to make a much better connection for the entire complex, for linking scholarship with the museum itself.

At the Sainsbury Wing, you have to contend again with VSB, specifically Denise Scott Brown, who has been extremely vocal about her displeasure with your proposal.

View looking south in the Sainsbury ground floor, with the original rusticated wall along the Grand Staircase. Photo courtesy Selldorf Architects

I appreciate Denise Scott Brown. And she is someone who has always felt that she wasn’t recognized enough. I don’t know what that’s like; I didn’t work alongside a husband whose charisma is such that everybody was on their knees. Her life story is compelling and interesting, and she never fails to remind us that she was trained as an urban planner. So, with San Diego, I felt she enjoyed my positive response to her thinking about La Jolla as a place. Yet I was quite surprised that—maybe because she is many years older and much more concerned about her legacy being intact and fully represented—she came back and complained about the removal of the pergola. She kept saying that it was the “beloved pergola.” I couldn’t remember anybody “beloving” it, but she apparently did. And I accept that.

With VSB’s Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991, the challenge is bigger, because it’s a Grade I listed building. The most frustrating aspect is that Denise and I never got to a point in the many, many, many, many—can I say a few more times “many”?—conversations that we had where she acknowledged there is a need for the building to change. She would always ask, “Why does it have to change? Why do you have to make Sainsbury the main entrance?” It was hard to have an exchange.