British Museum Great Court, London, UK - Diliff

The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, commonly referred to simply as the Great Court, is the covered central quadrangle of the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

in London. It was redeveloped during the late 1990s to a design by

Foster and Partners Foster + Partners is a British architectural, engineering, and integrated design practice founded in 1967 as Foster Associates by Norman Foster. It is the largest architectural firm in the UK with over 1,500 employees in 13 studios worldwide ...

, from a 1970s design by Colin St John Wilson. The court was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000.

Description

The court has a

tessellated A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of ...

glass roof, engineered by Buro HappoldQueen Elizabeth II Great Court, British Museum
accessed 22 November 2010 and built by

Waagner-Biro Waagner Biro is a Vienna-based group of companies formerly part of the same group which have developed into separately owned, independent companies operating in steel and mechanical engineering. Collectively, the companies have about 1000 employees ...

, covering the entire court, and surrounds the original circular

British Museum Reading Room The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, ...

in the centre, now a museum. It is the largest covered square in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

. The glass and steel roof is made up of 4,878 unique steel members connected at 1,566 unique nodes and 1,656 pairs of glass windowpanes making up 6,100 m² of glazing; each of a unique shape because of the undulating nature of the roof. Controversially, some of the stone in the court is from

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

, rather than being Portland Stone from southern

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

as agreed in the original contract with the masons. Within the Great Court, there are shops and a café. The court acts as a central linking point for the museum, somewhat like

I. M. Pei Ieoh Ming Pei
– website of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners ( ; ; April 26, 1917 – May 16, 2019) was ...

Louvre Pyramid The Louvre Pyramid (Pyramide du Louvre) is a large glass and metal structure designed by the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei. The pyramid is in the main courtyard ( Cour Napoléon) of the Louvre Palace in Paris, surrounded by three small ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

Construction

The central courtyard of the British Museum was occupied by the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

until 1997, when it moved to St Pancras. At that time the entire courtyard was filled with bookshelves, three storeys high (the "book stacks"). To get from one side of the museum to the other, visitors had to go around. Once the Library had moved out, the book stacks were cleared and the Great Court constructed in this central courtyard. A new 'ground' level was created, a storey higher than the original courtyard, with the space below used to accommodate the Clore Education Centre and the African galleries (which had been housed at the

Museum of Mankind Ethnography at the British Museum describes how ethnography has developed at the British Museum. Within the Department of Natural History and Curiosities The ethnographical collection was originally linked to the Department of Natural History a ...

since 1970). The South Portico was largely rebuilt, with two new lifts incorporated for disabled access to the upper levels of the museum. A new gridshell glass roof, designed and built by Austrian specialists

, was provided over the entire courtyard to create a covered space at the centre of the museum. The British Library Reading Room at the centre of the courtyard was retained and refurbished for use as the Museum library and information centre. The Reading Room had no outer wall; the book stacks came right up to the back of the Reading Room shelves. So a new outer wall was created to protect the Reading Room, to support the new roof and to conceal the ventilation ducts serving the spaces below. North of the Reading Room there is a block with a museum shop at ground level, a gallery for temporary exhibitions above and a restaurant above that, just below the glass roof.

Education facilities

The Clore Education Centre is housed in the lower level of the Great Court. It comprises the: * BP Lecture Theatre * Hugh and Catherine Stevenson Theatre * Raymond and Beverly Sackler seminar room * Studio, used for art and craft activities * Claus Moser seminar room * Ford Centre for Young Visitors * Samsung Digital Discovery Centre Nelson Mandela spoke at the inauguration of the BP Lecture Theatre on 16 November 2000. He supported the Museum's global role.

Sculptures

Upon the Great Court's opening to the public in 2000, twelve sculptures from the British Museum's collection were installed on the main floor of the concourse: * A

stela A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), wh ...

of the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (9th century BC) * A marble Lion of Knidos,

Asia Minor Anatolia, tr, Anadolu Yarımadası), and the Anatolian plateau, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent. It constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. The re ...

(3rd century BC) * Two heads of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (circa 1400 BC) * Two

obelisks An obelisk (; from grc, ὀβελίσκος ; diminutive of ''obelos'', " spit, nail, pointed pillar") is a tall, four-sided, narrow tapering monument which ends in a pyramid-like shape or pyramidion at the top. Originally constructed by An ...

of the Egyptian King

Nectanebo II Nectanebo II ( Egyptian: ; grc-gre, Νεκτανεβώς ) was the last native ruler of Ancient Egypt, as well as the third and last pharaoh from the Thirtieth Dynasty of Egypt. He reigned from 358 to 340 BC. Under Nectanebo II, Egypt prosper ...

(circa 350 BC) * Hoa Hakananai'a, a statue from

Easter Island Easter Island ( rap, Rapa Nui; es, Isla de Pascua) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is most famous for its ne ...

(Date unknown, but between 1200 and 1800 AD), later moved to Room 24 * Two

totem poles Totem poles ( hai, gyáaʼaang) are monumental carvings found in western Canada and the northwestern United States. They are a type of Northwest Coast art, consisting of poles, posts or pillars, carved with symbols or figures. They are usually m ...

from British Columbia (19th century AD) * A Roman equestrian statue (2nd century AD) * An Irish memorial slab carved in

Ogham Ogham ( Modern Irish: ; mga, ogum, ogom, later mga, ogam, label=none ) is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language (in the "orthodox" inscriptions, 4th to 6th centuries AD), and later the Old Irish langu ...

script (5th century AD) * An Anglo-Saxon cross shaft (late 8th/early 9th century AD) * A pair of Chinese guardian figures (17th century AD) * A column base from

Persepolis , native_name_lang = , alternate_name = , image = Gate of All Nations, Persepolis.jpg , image_size = , alt = , caption = Ruins of the Gate of All Nations, Persepolis. , map = , map_type ...

(5th century BC) There were initial plans for a new, thirteenth sculpture to be commissioned from

Anish Kapoor Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor (born 12 March 1954) is a British-Indian sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art. Born in Mumbai, Kapoor attended the elite all-boys Indian boarding school The Doon School, before moving to the UK t ...

, but these were scrapped. Image:British Museum New Great Court.jpg, East Portico of Sir Robert Smirke's building; Roman equestrian statue visible in the foreground Image:Britmuseum.jpg, Hoa Hakananai'a Image:Sculpture in Great Court.jpg, File:British Museum Great Court roof.jpg, The Reading Room and Great Court roof as viewed from ground level.

References

External links