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-centur...