Designed by Colin St. John Wilson; completed 1998 London, England
The British Library is arguably the most significant and controversial 20th-century
public building in London, equal in importance to Sir Williams Chambers’s Somerset
House in the 18th century and Charles Barry and A.W.N.Pugin’s Houses of Parliament in
the 19th century, and the largest public building commissioned in the 20th century. In
terms of its centrality as an institution, urbanistic visibility and impact, cost (£511
million, contrasted with £400 million for Norman Foster’s Stansted Airport Outside
London, and £35.5 million for the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London,
1990), size, length of gestation and realization, programmatic complexity, and
architectural uniqueness, the British Library has no contemporary rivals. Its designer, the
erudite Colin St. John Wilson (who earned a knighthood on its completion) enjoys a
professional history non-pareil in modern Britain, comparable only to those 19th-century
Beaux-Arts laureates who devoted entire careers to executing one or two major official
buildings, or to his noble forebear, Sir John Soane, who labored over the Bank of
England from 1788 to 1831 (although, unlike that vanished monument, destroyed in
1922, the British Library is likely to endure for several centuries).
Until 1998 the name of the British Library was synonymous with the British Museum,
where it had resided since 1785; first in Montague House and after 1826 in Robert
Smirke’s colonnaded Greek Revival stronghold. From 1857 scholars perused books in the
beloved round reading room surrounded by book stacks constructed by Sidney Smirke in
the open courtyard of the museum under a ferro-vitreous dome. Exponential growth of
the collection and readership led, in 1951, to a proposal for expansion. In 1962 Sir Leslie
Martin (1908–2000) and his younger colleague, Colin Wilson (who by 1964 was solely in
charge) were commissioned to design a new wing, adjacent to the existing museum
building, which would be part of a mixed development of commercial, residential, and
institutional uses.
Over the next 12 years, two different schemes were thoroughly worked out by Wilson
for the Bloomsbury site, but the developing Preservationist movement demanded a
different location. Furthermore, the merger in 1972 of the British Museum library with
the National Science library necessitated a larger site. In 1973 the government acquired
nine acres next to St. Pancras Station, for a completely independent structure. Over the
next 25 years, Wilson and his partners, including his wife, library expert M.J.Long
(1939–), grappled with shifting governments, altered requirements, surly bureaucrats,
inflation, tight budgets, fickle architectural fashion, transformations in information
technology, and fallible contractors, to bring to fruition a great library that, in the words
of its architect, “embodies and protects the freedom and diversity of the human spirit in a
way that borders on the sacred.”
The relocation of the British Library was advantageous for many reasons.
Not only did it allow for a more capacious building that would not be
crammed onto an inadequate site (integral to the design was the notion of
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expansion; only the first phase of a three-phase program has been erected),
but it represented a move to a part of London that, while more mercantile
and industrial than Bloomsbury, has a great future as an international
gateway, as it will provide a second terminus for cross-channel transit and
is the hub of several rail and underground lines. Fortunate too is its
proximity to St. Pancras Chambers (1878), now undergoing extensive
restoration. Sir George Gilbert, Scott’s Gothic Revival station and hotel,
completed in 1878 (also fiercely criticized in its time), is a more
sympathetic neighbor than the solemn stone museum, given Wilson’s
preference for the English Free style of the mid- and late 19th century over
the neoclassical movement that preceded it. Both ensembles are
multipurpose and contain very large spaces as well as more intimate
rooms; both draw passersby toward them by inflecting away from the
street; both have dramatic contrasts of vertical and horizontal volumes (a
slender clock tower on the library gestures to the bustling silhouette of St.
Pancras); and both are polychromatic (the pinkish-red brick used in the British Library comes from the same
Leicestershire source as that chosen by Scott), and in each case details are painted in
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contrasting hues. Further, the majestic train sheds behind the station, by engineers Ordish
and Barlow, anticipate the tremendous spans encountered in the library.
The library serves a diverse assortment of functions and audiences: it is an urban
stage, a forum, an art gallery, and a repository of knowledge. The generous plaza
provides an inviting oasis within a dense quarter of the city and caters to the casual
passerby as well as the bibliophile through impressive sculptures, generous seating, and
an outdoor coffee shop; it also gives access to a conference center with auditorium, which
can be entered independently when the main building is closed. Within the library, the
public is immediately welcomed; the information desk and cloakrooms on the ground and
lower levels and the cafeteria restaurants on the second and third floors are readily visible
and accessible. To the left are the bookshop and a two-story exhibition area, properly
protected from daylight, where rare manuscripts and educational materials are on display.
On the fourth floor, the Friends’ room leads to an ample landscaped terrace that
overlooks the urban scene to the northeast. Although the sections show a complicated
matrix of interlocking spaces, clear circulation patterns enable visitors to swiftly reach
different destinations.
The reading rooms are flooded with inspirational, carefully controlled natural light, as
is the main reception hall, which soars through the full height of the building and is the
hinge between the humanities wing on the northwest and the science wing to the east.
Those seeking information on technical subjects, where journals, ephemera, and
electronic media are the rule, frequent the five reading rooms devoted to science. Tables
are arranged around the perimeter and daylight enters through side windows; here, the
reference materials are immediately available to readers, as that is the way most such
researchers operate. The two humanities reading rooms, endowed with clerestories and
skylights that bounce natural light off curved reflector walls, vary in proportion as well,
allowing different temperaments to choose their preferred niches, open or intimate,
central or peripheral. There are smaller enclosures for maps, manuscripts, and rare books
and music. The books are stored in environmentally monitored levels below ground
(additional volumes are stored off-site); the automated catalog and mechanized delivery
make retrieval swift and efficient.
Wilson’s own scholarly habits have sensitized him to the comfort of the researchers.
The variety in the size, shape, and illumi-nation of the spaces counters potential reader
fatigue and contributes a sense of serenity and well-being that embraces both patrons and
staff. Custom-designed furniture of wood and leather and carefully placed, beautifully
detailed lamps and fittings provide a zone of concentration within the grander reaches of
the reading rooms.
Wilson’s credo that architectural form must derive from thoughtful attention to
program and that it must be humane and inclusive means that the British Library presents
no monolithic image to be captured in a single photograph. Rather, the building can be
appreciated only over time by a moving and involved observer/user. This is not to say
that Wilson overlooks the beauty inherent in the striking form or in materials that appeal
to touch and hearing as well as sight. Besides the typical concrete, brick, and glass, the
palette includes Purbeck stone, travertine, bronze, brass, leather, terra-cotta, glazed tile,
luscious carpeting, American oak, African teak, and steel painted red and green; as one
moves from public to private areas, the materials become softer and more sensual. The
aesthetic heart of the building, a literal tour de force, is the six-story glass and bronze box
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that houses the King’s Library, George III’s collection of rare books, donated to the
nation by George IV. The tower appears to arise from the watery depths beneath London,
thanks to the surrounding softly lighted and reflective “moat” of polished stone. A close
friend of many British artists, Wilson made certain that relevant art was included from
the start, such as the tapestry by R.B. Kitaj, the colossal sculptural transcription of
William Blake’s Newton by Eduardo Paolozzi, the bronze-cast typographic entrance
gates by David Kindersley, and the numerous busts, including, since 1999, one of the
architect himself, by Celia Scott.
Committed to “the other tradition” of modern architecture, Wilson pays subtle homage
in his masterwork to revered predecessors, especially Alvar Aalto and Hans Scharoun,
and there are discreet references to Frank Lloyd Wright, Sigurd Lewerentz, Le Corbusier,
Louis Kahn, James Stirling, H.P.Berlage, and Gunnar Asplund. However, this is no
Postmodern pastiche; rather, Wilson has assimilated the lessons of those masters to forge
an unmistakably personal synthesis that serves London urbanistically, aesthetically, and
programmatically in its own unique way, thoughtfully designed with its users’ comfort
and convenience in mind no less than producing an atmosphere conducive to scholarship,
contemplation, and general learning combined with sensual pleasure and intellectual
enjoyment.
