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From a library courtyard to the Great Court

Robert Smirke’s Greek Revival museum grew around a courtyard later filled by the library. Sydney Smirke’s Reading Room and Foster and Partners’ glass roof mark further changes in its use.

From a library courtyard to the Great Court

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How did a courtyard meant for a garden become a place for books, then a public square? The columns at the Museum’s front and the glass roof of the Great Court belong to different periods. Between them stands the circular Reading Room. Follow those three forms and you can read much of the building’s history without beginning with a list of dates. The Museum needed rooms for an expanding collection and library. Architects changed both the space and the ways people moved through it. A courtyard intended as a garden became a place for books, then a public space around the surviving Reading Room.

Robert Smirke and the nineteenth-century museum

Robert Smirke received the commission in 1821. His Greek Revival design used forms associated with ancient Greek buildings, including columns and a triangular pediment. The style gave a modern institution an architectural link with the antiquities inside it. The building developed through the nineteenth century as the collection and its needs grew. The court was originally intended as a garden.

Sydney Smirke and the library years

Bookstacks began occupying the court in 1852. The circular Reading Room opened in 1857 and belongs to the work of Sydney Smirke, Robert’s brother. Readers used a purpose-built room while books filled much of the space around it. The round wall now visible in the Great Court is therefore a surviving part of a much more crowded library arrangement.

Foster and Partners and the reopened court

The library department moved to St Pancras in 1997. Clearing the surrounding book stores allowed visitors to circulate around the Reading Room again. Foster and Partners designed the glass-and-steel roof for the new Great Court, opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 6 December 2000. Look from the roof grid to the circular wall and the older buildings around the edge. Those visible parts preserve successive changes in the Museum’s work.

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From a library courtyard to the Great Court · 1

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