Our Competition Proposal
In 2024, in a creative collaboration between Jamie Fobert Architects and Eric Parry Architects, we led one of five teams shortlisted to design the British Museum's Western Range, the Museum’s biggest building project since the 1820s, which sought to re-envisage and transform key parts of the iconic Bloomsbury site.
Our approach to unlocking the extraordinary potential of the Western Range focussed on restoring the fine historic fabric as well as creating exciting new contemporary galleries and a completely revitalised way of moving through the building. We brought together a design team of the highest calibre, including Purcell, Max Fordham and Price & Myers, with deep experience in heritage-led transformation, environmental design and structural innovation to meet the scale and ambition of the museum’s vision.
In our architectural studies, breaking open floor plates and peeling back walls allows a newfound freedom of movement.
Basement vaults reach up to the top galleries, creating a new hierarchy of scale. New light and volume honour the artefacts. The buried Robert Smirke architecture finally has the space to breathe again.
Narratives traverse cultures and times, encouraging non-linear interpretation of objects, giving visitors agency to tell their own stories, to engage and reflect.
'A Field of Interconnected Cultures'
By piercing the façade of the Great Court, breaking the single axis and allowing multiple entrances that drive through the depth of the Western Range, congestion can be relieved and the Great Court and the Western Range coexist in a much more congenial way.
Opening up ‘the Loop’
Relocating the South Stair transforms visitor experience and display of collections in the Western Range. Repositioning the Stair as a museum artefact will celebrate its heritage significance. Unlocking a clear and legible visitor route and enabling inspiring new galleries within historic spaces. As well, a new contemporary stair leads the visitor to the lower galleries.
Galleries
We aimed to bring clarity and authenticity to the retained and restored Robert Smirke galleries, now coherent in an inclusive visitor journey which makes way for a new set of extraordinary contemporary spaces.