Although I thought I was pretty familiar with the secondary literature on the Sainsbury Wing, I happened on a lecture which Bob Venturi gave at the Royal Society of Arts just the week before the designs were made public which provides an absolutely excellent and exceptionally clear description of his approach to museum design. It includes the following paragraph, which is a particularly succinct summary of his views:-

When you enter the museum you might wonder, are you in a museum or an airport ?  And by the time you reach the art, you are either worn down by the banality of the maze you have traversed, or jaded by the drama of the spatial, symbolic or chromatic fantasies the architect has ejaculated you through.   The art, when you reach it, has become a kind of anti-climax — in fact, dull as you perceive it with your, by then, constricted pupils, jaded sensibilities, and loss of orientation.[1]

This, I realise, is a good argument for not trying to be too adventurous in how the entrance hall is treated under the currently planned revision by Annabelle Selldorf, but trying to keep it as a cool, calm space without too obvious or assertive an architectural character.

[1] Robert Venturi, ‘From Invention to Convention in Architecture’, Journal of the Royal Society if Arts, Vol. 136, January 1988, p. 92.