LONDON - For decades, a visit to the British Museum was the ultimate lost and found experience.
Through lengthy corridors and up imposing staircases, more than 6.5 million visitors a year searched for such treasures as the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Athens and the Rosetta Stone from Egypt. The masterpieces were there, somewhere, in the labyrinth.
Now, the brain-twisting maze has been simplified by an architectural stroke of genius, the creation of Europe's largest covered square, a feat that adds light, space and order to one of the world's essential museums.
Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated the British Museum's Great Court yesterday, signaling the importance and immensity of the $150 million museum overhaul.
In every way imaginable, the project is a stunner, with an 800-ton steel and glass roof that covers a 2-acre inner courtyard, enabling visitors to bypass once-circuitous routes.
Standing defiantly in the courtyard's middle is the 150-year-old Reading Room, a drum-shaped oasis for research and learning where Karl Marx wrote "Das Kapital" and George Bernard Shaw and Robert Frost were among those who toiled at wooden desks.
Freed from the warren of library stacks and dreary storage rooms that were added over the years when the site also housed the British Library, the Reading Room now seems a rediscovered jewel. Outside, two staircases wrap around the room. Inside, the eggshell blue dome and gilded moldings glisten. Even the Reading Room's graceful windows, once blacked out, have been cleared, revealing the sight of the new roof with its 3,312 triangular glass panels and more than seven miles of steel.
"It's an uplifting, extraordinary space," says Suzanna Taverne, the museum's director. "It's a temple."
The courtyard project vividly illustrates the overhaul taking place at the institution that will celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2003 and which is trying to keep up with the demands of tourists and researchers.
The key step was taken in 1997 when the Reading Room was closed and the British Library's contents began to be moved to a new home one mile away, near St. Pancras train station.
Workers then came in to reclaim what had been hidden space, removing 1 million cubic feet of trash and pouring 6,000 tons of concrete. Then, in a feat of architectural and technical precision, they created the masterpiece roof that was designed by the firm headed by one of Britain's foremost architects, Norman Foster.
"It's a combination of respecting the old, but not being intimidated by it, confronting it and building on it," Lord Foster says, standing in the reading room.
As the project took shape, traditionalists heaped scorn on the work. Some of those critics were among the select few visitors who enjoyed the stimulating atmosphere of the Reading Room, where only those with tickets could enter.
Others became nearly apoplectic recently when it was revealed a British contractor allegedly duped the museum over the rebuilding of a 60-foot tall portico, which was demolished in the 1870s. The order called for the finest Portland limestone to match the existing structures, but the builder apparently used an ordinary limestone. French limestone, no less.
But nearly all criticism has been swept away amid a tide of praise.
The Guardian's Jonathan Glancy called the courtyard "one of the most extraordinary covered spaces to be found in any city, ancient or modern." Giles Worsley of The Telegraph wrote, "It will be a dull visitor who does not stop for a moment, transfixed by the looming image of the Reading Room and the oscillating curves of the new roof. Perhaps more importantly, for the first time since soon after it was built, the world's most visited museum should actually work."
The Times of London headlined its review: "The British Museum Gains A Masterpiece."
The space provides a heart for an extraordinary museum, founded in 1753 by an Act of the British Parliament, and filled with treasures extracted from the ages.`The British Museum is an organization that is there to illustrate world cultures through the understanding of objects," says Taverne, the director. "Understanding what the objects are, how they are used, where they are from, how they are signified, makes that illumination possible."
From Roman coins to prototype euro bills, Egyptian mummies to an exhibition of Picasso prints, decorative arts to utilitarian tools, the museum provides an intellectual and emotional journey through history. The depth of the treasure is revealed by the new, easy-to-read directions that point visitors to collections for Egypt, Greece, Rome, China and Japan.
And there's no admission charge.
