Released five shortlisted competition entries by 6a architects, David Chipperfield Architects, OMA, Lina Ghotmeh, and Eric Parry Architects plus Jamie Fobert Architects for developing a design for a significant part of its British Museum’s Bloomsbury site: The Western Range.
What is your team all about?
Our multidisciplinary team brings together diverse expertise in museum and exhibition design, conservation and sustainability. Through dynamic collaboration with the Museum and the public, our team will deliver an innovative vision for the Western Range.
What is your big idea for the Western Range galleries?
Tomorrow’s British Museum must move beyond the restrictive, finite limitations of the universal museum.
Our approach reimagines the British Museum as a pluriversal space; a creative and productive place where multiple voices, entwined stories and contested histories are all embraced. No single intervention can resolve the British Museum’s many complex challenges. Instead, a series of interconnected strategies focused around two new public halls will have a broader transformative impact.
_
_
6a architects
What is your team all about?
Our team – 6a architects, Purcell, Gitta Gschwendter, Kellenberger and White, and Arup – are architects, designers and engineers based near the Museum. We design award-winning, sustainable cultural projects in historic buildings around the world.
What is your big idea for the Western Range galleries?
We see the future of the British Museum as an ecosystem of artefacts and collections, people and places, nature and culture.
Reopening the original courtyards of the 1838 design creates spaces for beautiful gardens, introducing biodiversity into the heart of the Museum, and a stunning top-lit gallery for the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos.
They allow the surrounding brick vaults to be opened for the first time, revealing more space for artefacts and their stories.
Materials removed will be reused to make a roof garden, framing London’s skyline.
_
_
Parry + Fobert
What is your team all about?
This important moment in the British Museum’s history will have our unflinching commitment. We bring a design team of the highest calibre, who can fulfil the scale and ambition of the museum’s vision.
What is your big idea for the Western Range Galleries?
We propose a realisation of the British Museum’s full potential as the world’s museum of one humanity.
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 will finally have 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.
_
_
Lina Ghotmeh
What is your team all about?
We are a diverse, multidisciplinary team enriched by voices from the cultures represented in the British Museum’s collections. Rooted in history and inspired by innovation, we design spaces that heal, connect, and inspire shared futures.
What is your big idea for the Western Range Galleries?
Our vision transforms the Western Range into a living museum—a place of dialogue and reinvention. “An Archaeology of the Future,” where historic narratives intertwine with contemporary perspectives.
With a commitment to sustainability and inclusivity, we reimagine a rich canvas of enchanting experiences sparking curiosity, cultural exchange, and healing.
Voices from across time and place speak, inviting visitors to participate in universal connections through tactile encounters and immersive storytelling. This bold transformation renews the British Museum as a global meeting point of shared history where poetics and care foster peace and understanding.
_
_
OMA
What is your team all about?
OMA – and the team we’ve assembled to help modernize the British Museum – is equally obsessed with the past and the future. Everyone is a collaborator. We are critical and pragmatic, we combine radicality and modesty.
What is your big idea for the Western Range galleries?
Maximum impact, minimum intervention: transforming two underused, infilled courtyards modernizes the functioning and expands the potential of the entire British Museum.
The 21st Century Studio will be a sophisticated curatorial instrument, covering an arc from antiquity to the digital. A multi-story Cabinet of Cultures updates the Wunderkammer for today. Research Galleries are dedicated to study and display artefacts with innovative technologies. Vertical storage will reveal more of the British Museum’s staggering, world-affirming collection. The basement arches will be liberated for the mummies and more.
_
