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The British Museum's Great Court.
Designed by Foster and Partners, engineered by Buro Happold and built by Waagner-Biro.
The first step in the recreation of the Great Court was the demolition of the undistinguished post-war buildings that served as bookstacks around the drum of the Reading Room. The southern portico, which was demolished to enlarge the Museum’s entrance hall in the 1870s, has been reinstated to a new design.
To allow the Great Court to be used no matter what the weather, it is covered with an undulating glazed roof. It has no visible supports to detract from the restoration of the classical facades around it. Instead it spans the gap between the facades and the drum of the Reading Room as a self-supporting structure.
The undulating, minimal steel latticework supports 3,312 unique triangular glass panels. Each one is different in size and shape because of the roof’s complex geometric form, which results from the fact that the Reading Room is not exactly in the centre of the Great Court, but is 5 metres closer to the northern portico. A specially written computer programme was required to work out the exact dimensions and angles of each panel, each of which has been sponsored by an individual or company.
[arquitecturaviva.com]
British Museum architectural roof joining the two buildings together. The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, designed by architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank, was opened by Her Majesty the Queen on 6 December 2000. Following the departure to St Pancras of the Museum's library departments in 1998, now the British Library, the bookstacks surrounding Sydney Smirke's round Reading Room were dismantled and a new floor constructed across the courtyard. This was then roofed over to provide the largest covered square in Europe. The Reading Room was restored to its 1857 decorative scheme and new facilities (Clore Education Centre, Sainsbury African Galleries, Ford Young Visitors Centre, BP and Stevenson Lecture Theatres) constructed below. The scheme also created new access to other galleries.
This is the first floor of Biomed past the InfoStations as it appeared in 1999. On the left are the bookstacks, and on the right are current journals. When I started we had around 3000 active print journals. Today we're at around 600 in print and decreasing all the time - that's how much has gone online now. Around the perimeter were individual study carrels and in the middle were a few tables. We didn't have much study space at all.
Tracy finished her GSLIS degree last year; they both work in the library. Tracy is in Cataloguing and Stuart works in the Bookstacks Office.
Not pictured: Avatar and Fantastic Mr. Fox. They were snatched up before we could get the picture taken!
I've been reading a lot. So the bookmark I got for Christmas has been coming in handy.
Basically, setup at work today took like two seconds so I wandered the bookstacks while we were waiting for orientation kids to show up. And I read half of the book I got because we did nothing for another hour and a half.