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Unlocking the Potential
Great institutions and their buildings enjoy a complex relationship. The British Museum was founded by Act of Parliament in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759. Its first home was an existing late seventeenth century house, Montague House, which stood on the site in Great Russell Street which the Museum has occupied ever since. Following the death of George III his library was bequeathed to the nation and into the care of the Museum and, in 1823, Robert Smirke was commissioned to design a building to house the King's Library and to provide a proper home for the Museum's collections. Smirke's neo-classical design, which is the core of the existing building, was completed in 1847. It had four principal wings arranged around a central quadrangle measuring 96m x 72m. This was conceived as a major public space at the heart of the museum and its architecture clearly expressed this.
Almost as soon as the building was finished, however, it was unable to meet the ever-growing demands of the collections. The response was to construct a new reading room, surrounded by book stacks, in the quadrangle, to provide increased reading space and book storage for the library collections. This project, which led to the construction of the great circular Reading Room, was conceived by Antonio Panizzi, who was Keeper of Printed Books at the Museum. It was executed by Sydney Smirke, who had succeeded his brother as the museum's architect. Construction began in 1854 and the building was finished by May 1857.
The significance of this historical outline is that the demands of the growing collections meant that Smirke's quadrangle, a space which was fundamental to his design, was filled-in and made inaccessible to the public almost as soon as it was completed. But now the transfer of the British Library has offered the opportunity to recover it and to bring it into new use as a great public space at the heart of the museum. This is the genesis and intention of Foster's project.
THE GREAT COURT PROJECT
In essence the project is extremely simple. The quadrangle has been cleared of all structures except for the rotunda of the Reading Room, the internal facades are restored and a glazed roof is thrown over the space, now called the Great Court. This will become the focal point for the entire Museum. At the principal floor level there will be information services, a café, and space for a greatly expanded museum shop; there will also be direct access to the restored Reading Room, which will be open to all visitors, and will contain compass, a new multi-media access system to the Museum's collections and a 25,000 volume reference library. At a newly created lower level there will be the education centre and galleries for part of the ethnography collection. The rotunda of the Reading Room is to be partially enlarged to the north by a tiered ellipse which will provide space for temporary exhibitions and a restaurant at the upper level. The Great Court and its facilities will remain open in the evening, after the museum has closed to the public, and will serve as part of the network of public routes running north-south through the city.
The virtue of the design is that it preserves this clarity of conception through its execution. But such apparent simplicity is seldom achieved easily and this is particularly the case when, as here, a complex and technically demanding brief has to be satisfied while preserving, in fact whilst enhancing, the qualities of the existing Grade I listed buildings. In many respects these buildings have, through their intrinsic architectural quality and, in the case of the Reading Room, by association with great figures in the cultural history of the past, themselves become significant exhibits. This demands the greatest care in the new design.
HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY
Robert Smirke's building was based on the construction techniques of the eighteenth century. It is of load-bearing masonry construction and the dimensions of its principal spaces are determined by both the spanning limitations of that technology and by the rules of proportion of Georgian architecture which related the sizes of rooms to the dimensions of their windows in order to achieve a good amount of daylight. But, in the few years between its completion and the construction of the Reading Room, Victorian engineering offered new possibilities of both construction and environmental control. The structure is a frame of cast and wrought iron, infilled with brickwork. The environment of the room made use of the latest techniques, delivering heat to the reading desks in winter and fresh air in summer. Foul air was extracted through decorated outlets in the soffits of each of the twenty window openings and through openings in the oculus. Initially the room was lit purely through natural light, and was closed to readers when the light failed. The first experiment with electric lighting took place in 1879, and in 1881 an installation of Siemens arc lamps, each of 5000 candle power, allowed the opening hours of the room to be extended to 8pm.
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