British Museum Western Range Competition to find an Architect-Led Design Team

The British Museum is delighted to launch this international competition to choose a visionary, architect-led design team to work with the Museum to develop an extraordinary design for a significant part of its Bloomsbury site: The Western Range.

This is an important commission to re-envisage and transform key parts of the main, iconic site in Bloomsbury. This will be the Museum’s biggest building project since the 1820s, when work commenced on the original quadrangle.

The ambition is significant: to restore the Western Range and, in so doing, reimagine a third of the existing gallery area, deliver improved collections storage and create new amenities to enhance the visitor experience, making the collection as accessible as possible to all the Museum’s audiences.

SCOPE OF SERVICES

The primary aim of this project is to enhance the visitor experience and offer the Museum a series of renewed gallery and collection storage spaces that allow the extraordinary permanent collections to be cared for, researched and displayed for modern audiences. Importantly the Museum is also looking to resolve the current problems it is facing of an over-complex and constricted site with a dilapidating building stock that is poorly suited to its requirements. The complexity of the site and the scope of work requires the appointed design team to include many different skills, possibly from different organisations. There are three key strands to the work:

BUILDING DESIGN

The new Western Range will include gallery spaces, visitor welfare and circulation facilities, collection stores and research spaces. Each element will need to be sensitively designed within an architecture that respects the existing, while introducing powerful new interventions. The winning team will need to satisfy a range of stakeholders and secure listed building consents, expressed functionality, required adjacencies, ambitious sustainability criteria, and day-to-day requirements for maintenance and maintainability.

VISITOR EXPERIENCE

The interior layout and design of the visitor experience and amenities will play an important role in the success of this project, including arrival, circulation and way-finding routes. The winning team will understand how to create inviting vistas across the site, making best use of natural light, the juxtaposition of internal volumes and passive ventilation to enhance visitors’ enjoyment of the new museum experience. Accessibility and comfort for all is a given and consideration of seating and rest areas will need to be incorporated at the earliest stage of the design.

GALLERY EXHIBITION DESIGN

Given the long-term phasing of this project, the Museum is proposing three gallery exhibition packages for the permanent galleries in the new Western Range: only the first of these is an integral part of this competition brief. The gallery displays that will be included within this first package are dependent on the overall approach to phasing of the project and will therefore be determined, with the successful team, following the completion of RIBA Stage 2 design. Please note that the new galleries may well house different collections, as the Museum’s site-wide redisplay strategy is developed.

This means that the winning team will need to include gallery exhibition designers with evidenced understanding of museology who can work alongside the Museum’s own curatorial and content teams and deliver gallery spaces that astound the world within the first phase of work. As well as delivering the designs for the first phase of galleries, the winning team must be able to create a building design that allows future design teams to insert new galleries into latter phases of the project, allowing for varied creative voices to be involved in the long-term design of the project, ensuring an end-design that is vibrant, integrated and bespoke for each gallery.

The estimated total value of the contract stated in this Contract Notice is derived from an order of magnitude assessment of the construction value of the Western Range programme based on project work to date and must be treated as indicative only. The duration dates for the overall programme are also indicative only and are subject to change. Additional information: To respond to this opportunity please click here: https://www.delta-esourcing.com/respond/KER27J362P