Sumerian. Mesopota-mian. Byzantine. The politics of the British Museum have long been as arcane as this august institution's labyrinth of stuffed galleries. But in recent months, the vicious carping surrounding the construction of the museum's magnificent new Great Court has been less the stuff of ancient civilisations than fodder for tabloid headlines. Great bitching in the Great Court.
The reason is the row over who is to blame for the £100m lottery-fuelled project falling into disfavour with English Heritage because the wrong sort of stone was used on the south facade of the Great Court. A new Ionic portico, the principal gateway to the two-acre Great Court, has been erected here to replace an original demolished 125 years ago. The contractor supplied a couple of thousand tons of Anstrude Roche Claire limestone for the task, instead of good old Portland stone. The former is French and, therefore, in the eyes of the Heritage chaps, a bad thing. There have been tantrums and calls for resignations in the exquisite halls of one of the most popular museums in the world.
No doubt something a little dodgy has been going on somewhere along the line between the French quarries and Bloomsbury but, for visitors to the Great Court, this storm in a wine goblet will mean little if anything. In 10 years, few will know or care what all the fuss was for. What they will know, instead, is one of the most extraordinary covered squares to be found in any city, ancient or modern.
Designed by Foster and Partners and engineered by Buro Happold, the Great Court is the largest covered square in Europe. Entered from the controversial portico, it takes the breath away. It is not just the scale of what has, for nearly 150 years, been Britain's most secret courtyard that takes the visitor aback. It is the almost surreal effect of seeing the former Reading Room - the haunt of Marx and Mumford, Ruskin and Rossetti, Yeats and Sun Yat-Sen - looking quite so small in this Brobdingnagian space. At 140ft in diameter, the dome of Sydney Smirke's Reading Room is just 2ft smaller than that mother of all domes, the Pantheon in the heart of Rome. Here, though, surrounded by the restored Portland stone walls of Robert Smirke's chaste Grecian courtyard, and under the billowing new Foster/Happold glass roof, the younger Smirke's famous library seems almost dwarfed.
This astonishing sight reminds me of Piranesi's daunting engraved vision of the Temple of Vesta (from his book, Prima Parte, 1762); here a great circular Corinthian temple appears to be growing up inside a much larger Pantheon-style temple. Citizens in togas mounting the stairs that wrap around the temple-within-a-temple seem quite dwarfed: as in Piranesi's imaginary ancient Rome, so in contemporary Bloomsbury.
This extraordinary telescoping of space really is an odd experience; it's rather like being Gulliver on his travels. Step inside the painstakingly restored Reading Room with its distinctive cartwheel of 35 long desks and, far from being small, it feels immense - which it is. The Great Court truly lives up to its name. This newly excavated and brilliantly remodelled courtyard is likely to become one of the most popular, and certainly the busiest, meeting places in London this side of the concourses of Waterloo and Victoria stations.
Even then, what you see walking under the curved, crisscross-patterned glass roof of the Great Court, through which Sydney Smirke's copper dome blooms voluptuously into the London cloudscape, is only a small part of the huge reconstruction that has taken place behind the walls of the British Museum in just 33 months and without the building having to close to its teeming public. Below the new courtyard floor are new lecture theatres and study rooms: Smirke's Reading Room is truly the tip of an architectural iceburg. It is also the hub around which visitors will trace new routes through the museum and where they will find an intriguing new cafe that wraps around the drum of the Reading Room and is approached by stone stairs (the Heritage chaps will have to avoid these; they're made of Galicia Capri limestone from Spain, a foreign country) that echo those of Piranesi's Temple of Vesta.
The Reading Room at the centre of the Great Court thus becomes the new heart of this cultural behemoth. This helps visitors to the museum enormously. To date, because of the museum's linear plan, they have had to retrace their tracks several times to get from one gallery to another. From next week, when the Great Court opens, they will be able to criss-cross the museum, making new cultural connections and stopping under the great glass roof for a break. During museum opening hours, the Great Court will also act as the centre of a pedestrian route from north to south across Bloomsbury through the museum: handy on a wet day.
The roof of the Great Court is a triumph. Foster is not the first archi tect to come up with plans for a glass roof here. In 1852, just two years after the completion of Robert Smirke's grand Greek Revival design, Charles Barry, joint architect of the Palace of Westminster, proposed roofing over the courtyard - then a garden - with sheets of glass supported on 50 iron pillars. This new space, inspired by Paxton's Crystal Palace of the year before, was to have served as a Hall of Antiquities.
It never happened, largely because the Reading Room did. This opened in 1857. Together with its attendant book stacks, it filled in the courtyard which then disappeared from public view, until now. Most of the tens of millions who have pushed and shoved their way from the Egyptian mummies to the last sad pages of Captain Scott's manuscript diary will have had no idea that the biggest space of all in the museum - 40% of the entire museum site - was entirely hidden from them.
It was freed up again when the British Library finally moved to its new premises up the road on the old Somers Town goods yard site at Kings Cross in 1998. Glazing over the courtyard was no doddle. For whatever reason, Smirke minor positioned the drum and dome of his reading room some way off centre. As a consequence, the geometry of the Foster/Happold roof is complex. And yet it looks effortless, a gently billowing cloud of almost ethereal geometric steel and glass contrasting elegantly with the British (hurrah), French (shame) and Spanish (poor show) stone of the classical architecture and statuary below. The antique sculpture on display in the Great Court will be joined by Anish Kapoor's stainless steel eyecatcher titled Turning the World Upside Down. This tall, mirror-like sculpture is set in front of the entrance to the Reading Room on an axis with the controversial south portico. It promises to play a clever and delightful game with the immensely grand, if not solemn, architecture and mesmerising geometry of the Great Court.
Schemes for remodelling and extending the British Museum and rehousing the British Library date back many years. Yet, by waiting the best part of 40 years, the Museum appears to have done the right thing. Earlier plans would have meant a big new British Library building in the heart of Bloomsbury and the destruction of the dense old streetscape Robert Smirke's chaste masterpiece inhabits.
Instead, with the British Library removed to a daunting brick palazzo a few hundred yards to the north, we can enjoy Smirke at his best. While the Great Court has been remodelled, the Regency interiors have been restored to their original decorative scheme. We can enjoy, too, the old streets here that act as a chatterbox backdrop to the silent screen of Ionic columns (based on those of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor) that have characterised the BM for the past 150 years.
Foster won the Great Court commission in 1993 after an open competition entered by 132 firms of architects worldwide. While work was in progress in Bloomsbury, he was also at work on the reconstruction of the Reichstag, the new seat of the German parliament, in Berlin. This, too, consists of a grand classical building (although not nearly as refined as Smirke's) topped with a huge dome.
The heart of both these great civic statements are now open to their respective publics. The way in which we are learning to open some of our greatest, yet far too often most secret, buildings to the public is encouraging. There are many more to come, yet as we begin to uncover and reveal these secret worlds, we will involve an increasing number of people in an intelligent discussion of how we might nurture our architectural heritage. In the design of the Great Court, Foster and his team have shown how the design of one era can be enhanced by that of another.
When the bitching stops and the petty emporers of our Byzantine cultural establishment put away their sharp, ambitious knives, the public en masse will see just how great the Great Court is.
· The Great Court at the British Museum, London WC1, opens December 7. Details: 020-7323 8000. Open Court at the British Museum, aTV documentary, is on BBC2 6.45pm, December 2.
- Bouw & Wonen Partners:
