Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When construction began in Bloomsbury in 1823, the British Museum was said to be one of the biggest building sites in Europe. Two centuries later, it is destined to become a huge construction site again as Britain’s largest cultural capital project. It was announced last week that the winner of a competition to reimagine the museum’s western maze of galleries is Paris-based Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh. It is a good thing that, at 44, she is relatively young. Because this might take a while. Fending off competition from better-known architectural names including David Chipperfield, OMA, Eric Parry, Jamie Fobert and 6a, this will be a remarkable leap in profile for Ghotmeh, who has been building a reputation as an intriguing designer for a decade or so. It is a monumental commission; perhaps a lifetime’s work and certainly a once-in-a-generation attempt to redesign and redefine the museum. And the British Museum needs it. Mired in bad news stories — from the theft and loss of hundreds of artefacts, some allegedly sold on eBay by a curator, to an IT hack and the ongoing issues of BP’s sponsorship and the fate of the Parthenon Marbles — the museum is due a rethink. Under new director Nicholas Cullinan, it will get one. He has suggested that this will be “the biggest transformation of any museum in the world — not just physically, but intellectually too”.There is not yet much detail about what that intellectual reinterpretation might entail. Debates around restitution, the display of human remains and the very idea of a universal museum continue to rage, and it will be intriguing to see how architecture can address them. Perhaps the choice of a woman architect from the Middle East can itself begin that redress, a shift of perspective from Beirut via Paris, one an ancient city constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, the other the home of the Louvre, the former royal palace which was the ideal against which the resolutely civic British Museum had set itself.This project is being billed as the museum’s biggest transformation in decades. That may surprise visitors who are familiar with Norman Foster’s massive intervention in the form of the glass-roofed Great Court, which opened in 2000, but this is a more complex, intricate project. It involves excavating, opening up, linking through and rationalising the galleries on the western side of the building, one-third of the museum’s exhibition space. The “Western Range” accommodates the museum’s most impressive artefacts — huge stone pieces from Ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome — and forms a complex tangle of spaces condensed into an entirely enclosed area between the Great Court and Bloomsbury Street. The British Museum is itself an artefact. The institution, dating back to 1753, was the world’s first public national museum, established by an act of parliament. Like its 8mn artefacts, of which only about 1 per cent are on display at any time, the museum building is a collection of architectures illustrating changing tastes in conceptions of culture and material, lighting and labelling, colonisation and collecting. Ghotmeh’s approach (gleaned from a few tentative renderings) appears to acknowledge the status of the museum as a site of archaeology itself, with a treatment that scrapes away at layers and strata in the structure. There is an echo here of the building she became globally known for: the Stone Garden apartment tower in Beirut. This super-solid structure appears almost as a cliff, a quarry or perhaps an old fortified tower, a mass of stone that has been carved out to create living spaces.Unlike the massive capital projects of the millennium, there should be no desire here to create any kind of icon. This is an architectural intervention with no external manifestation, an inward-looking project which, although it might have radical aims in its intent to reimagine the displays for the future, is entirely contained within a structure with an existing and powerful identity. The dangers of imposing too much of a new agenda are clear in past projects. The Great Court was seen as necessary to create a space for a growing numbers of visitors (5.8mn in 2023) to orientate themselves, a central public plaza. But it fell into a trap of becoming a kind of mall-space, a huge, rather banal volume at odds with the dark intensity of the rest of the interior. It also managed to somehow emasculate the otherwise awesome reading room, now utterly overwhelmed by the white doughnut of space around it.Ghotmeh will need to excavate the museum to make full use of the constricted site, exposing the museum’s extensive vaults to public use, burrowing down and connecting in three dimensions. The designs presented so far appear to show only a scenographic effect, an impression of a huge courtyard topped by a gently draped roof. It has the feel of a building in a desert, sandblown and supported on squat, rather fashionable (though utterly unfashionable by the time this is complete) arches below. There seems to be some kind of filmic desire to recreate the conditions of a Middle Eastern archaeological setting here, an “Indiana Jones” outfitting. There is suspiciously little on display apart from a few carefully chosen and picturesque fragments. I might suggest that it ought to display more of the 8mn objects, not fewer.I wonder whether the real archaeology here, the layers of existing brick vaults and courts, might have presented a more ready-made archaeology than an imposed and confected one. Think of David Chipperfield’s work at the Neues Museum in Berlin, which revealed the traces of war and damage to create a highly theatrical series of spaces born out of the material itself. Nevertheless, Ghotmeh, a thoughtful architect who also designed London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2023 and the striking Estonian National Museum in Tartu, will be able to refine the design, rethinking as she encounters the actual conditions. It will be a long while before we see the changes sketched out here as a reality, and they will change and shift along the way. But I hope the museum can appreciate its own place as a critical part of history itself. This should be as much a project about appreciating an intensely used, debated, visited and loved slice of the city as it is about displaying the treasures of the world.Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
