THE GREAT COURT.

A public space has been created at the heart of a great institution, providing the hub of a new circulation system.

If for nothing else, the millennial year in Britain was remarkable for an extraordinary expansion in museum construction. The year culminated with the opening of the Great Court at the British Museum -- Foster and Partners' glamorous restoration to glory of Robert Smirke's Greek Revivalist courtyard and of his brother Sydney's famous round reading room, and the practice's addition to the courtyard of a billowing glass roof.

The last is an ambitious intervention, because of the scale and nature of the work to one of the country's most august institutions, and because it represents for the museum a wholesale change in emphasis, away from the scholarly to the popular (though the museum is keen to point out the academic will by no means be neglected). Its new image is due to a desire to attract more people and to this end, make the place more accessible, comprehensible and comfortable. In this the Museum is no exception, for all such recipients of lottery and private sources of monies must strive to be successful commercial concerns.

The history of change, past and present, to the British Museum is indissolubly linked with shortage of space. It was established in 1753 when Montagu House, a large mansion in Bloomsbury, was bought with lottery money to house the Sloane collection. Consisting of some 80 000 objects (natural history, antiquities and artificial curiosities, coins, prints, books, manuscripts) and a large herbarium, it had been bequeathed to the nation by collector and physician, Hans Sloane, and was one of the wonders of London. [1] Thereafter the collection grew apace with the nineteenth-century passion for exploration, discovery, and accumulation.

In 1816 (when Lord Elgin brought the Parthenon sculptures to London), Robert Smirke was brought in to alleviate the problem of space; and his scheme for a quadrangle, enclosing a two-acre courtyard, was begun in 1823 and finished about 25 years later. Designed in the then-fashionable Greek Revival style, the buildings at first incorporated Montagu House on the south. This was eventually demolished and by 1848 replaced by the present majestic south front.

By this time, lack of space was again a problem, in spite of the departure of the painting collection to the National Gallery. Developing the courtyard appeared an obvious solution and rough sketches for a reading room in the centre, by the principal librarian, Antonio Panizzi, were worked into a formal scheme by Sydney Smirke, who had taken over as the museum's principal architect. Opened in 1857, this was as innovative a piece of engineering as Foster's new glass roof. In form a cylindrical drum surmounted by a hemispherical dome (a little smaller than that of the Pantheon in Rome), it had a cast-iron frame and cylindrical brick skin pierced by large arched windows. Its richly decorated interior is based on papier mache panels fixed to a wooden underframe in turn attached to the cast-iron skeleton. In time, the rest of the quadrangle filled up with bookstacks.

According to deputy director, Suzanne Taverne, Foster's scheme has interpreted the museum's vision perfectly. Arising from the 'marriage of function and form' [2] it proposed a glorious new fulcrum. To achieve this, Smirke's courtyard would be cleared of bookstacks, and the facades restored. The round reading room, once closed to everyone without a reader's ticket, would also be restored and opened to the general public. It was to be surrounded by an elliptical structure providing two lecture theatres and seminar rooms for a new education centre, a shop on the ground floor and restaurant on the top. Three bridges would lead to upper galleries on the west, north and east. And overall, would be a transparent roof so that the courtyard could be used like a winter garden in all seasons. [3]

By 1998, when work began on the Great Court, [4] Fosters' original plans had been changed somewhat. A glass roof was felt more desirable than plastic - more durable and presumably suited to the nineteenth-century traditions of the institution. An objection concerned the size of the ellipse which was felt to be too big for the square and too close to the south portico. So it was reduced to a half-ellipse on the north side, served by two monumental staircases leading up to a crescent-shaped gallery. The restaurant above was made to look directly into the dome. It is linked to the Smirke building by the one remaining bridge (those on west and east were felt to obstruct views). Diminishing the ellipse meant finding another home for the education centre, which was moved to the upper basement.

Foster's scheme is an extraordinarily seamless affair with roof, reading room and floor a unified composition held within the Smirkes' classical embrace. The restored and lusciously redecorated reading room is one of London's new treasures; and the steel and glass roof, designed with Buro Happold, a marvel of technology. It is a toroidal construction -- a square doughnut with a hole in the middle -- that recalls Foster's early work with Buckminster Fuller. Arched for strength, it is a fine latticed shell floating without visible support and imposing as small a load as possible onto surrounding structures. Its complexity derives from the fact that the reading room is not exactly in the centre of the Great Court. The roof spans from the four sides of the quadrangle onto a new ring of 20 columns that surround the reading room's drum and are concealed by its new smooth stone skin. Triangular panels of fritted and tinted glass, each unique, are attached directly to the steel structure so that, springing from the c rown of the drum above a garland of lights, it appears to be barely tethered.

Stonework is immaculately executed. The reading room and its semi-elliptical extension are clad in monochromely pale Spanish stone counterpoised to the Portland stone of the Classical facades, in which patching is deliberately clearly visible.

On the south, the new enlarged portico was designed to improve access from the front hall and house liftshafts -- which it does in reticent manner. But as part of the variegated composition, the white French stone of which it is constructed (to an outcry from conservationists) does have a lifeless quality. And in spite of, or perhaps because of, the Great Court's splendour, there are qualms. The very seamlessness of the composition, with its glossy floor, lends a sleekness that, for some, will accord ill with the rest of the museum. As a shining beacon in the museum's centre, it seems to suck light from adjoining galleries. Then, the elliptical extension, up against the best of the porticos on the north, is simply too big. This is most evident on the west where the staircase swinging around dwarfs the portico. The roof is a marvel, but the swimming pool acoustics are oppressive and lighting on a dull day was gloomy.

Yet circulation has been improved immeasurably and no longer do you have to negotiate a labyrinth when traversing the museum. The Great Court is part of a larger scheme by the practice -- the establishment of a clear route from south to north, from Great Russell Street and forecourt on the south, through the Great Court to the North Library and Montague Place. [5] Such a proposal clearly involves work on each side of the quadrangle. On the south, Fosters' have redesigned the forecourt, setting off the majestic front of the museum and creating a new public square. A second phase will turn the North Library into new Ethnology Galleries. Completion is due in 2003.

(1.) Building the British Museum, by Marjorie Caygill & Christopher Date: published by the British Museum Press, p12.

(2.) The Great Court end The British Museum, by Robert Anderson, The British Museum Press: p41.

(3.) Smirke's proposals of 1821 envisaged a central garden for the public. In 1852, Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, proposed a glass canopy supported by 50 pillars.

(4.) It was completed in two and a half years, a remarkable feat made possible by sophisticated engineering and building techniques. In particular, the exterior and interior were in a fragile state and ground movement had to be strictly monitored.

(5.) Part of a larger route from the British Library in the north, to Trafalgar Square and the Thames to the south, presaged by 1960s plans by Leslie Martin and Colin St John Wilson.