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A Museum in Need
The British Museum is one of the great Neo-Classical monuments of Europe, yet it has, oddly enough, never been much admired, let alone loved. Work started on Sir Robert Smirke's building in 1823, but the imposing entrance colonnade was completed only in 1847. (In contrast, Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin was designed and constructed between 1823 and 1828).
By the late 1840s tastes had changed and the Greek Revival style seemed hopelessly old fashioned. Even before the great portico was complete, the builder had described it as 'wanting in dignity, in character, in everything except the most effete and out wrought mannerism'.
For Ian Nairn, writing in the 1960s, 'it never comes to life for a moment … a prime illustration of the difference between a real design and honest application'.
For Nairn, the highlight was the Reading Room: 'As sure-footed and live as the rest of the museum is embalmed.' Three years ago the Reading Room closed, its books and readers dispatched to the wastes of the new British Library at St Pancras. This week, the Reading Room reopened, immaculately restored to its 1850s appearance and with new books and new readers (the general public, rather than academics and acolytes of the PhD industry) as the centrepiece of Foster and Partners' Queen Elizabeth II Great Court.
The Great Court is classic Foster, a seamless, hugely confident welding together of conservation and innovation to produce not just an addition to a great world museum but, equally, a radical extension to London's public domain which merits comparison, for example, with the magnificent reconstruction of Somerset House.
It is this latter element of the project which sets it apart, for example, from Pei's Grand Louvre (great spaces but no resolution of the problems of circulation).
The site for the Great Court project (the subject of a 1994 competition) was the museum's central quadrangle, 'a dull, miserable looking space', as a 19th century critic described it, not much missed when (in 1854-55) it was largely filled by Sydney Smirke's Round Reading Room. The drum of this cast-iron-framed structure was quickly enveloped by book stacks and the central quadrangle soon became no more than a memory. The north-south route from J J Burnet's Edward vii Galleries (opened in 1914) was always tortuous for anyone not in possession of a Reader's Ticket and positively daunting for the elderly and unfit.
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