On London's great institutional interiors and the quality of arriving before the crowds
London's great museum interiors share a quality that is difficult to name precisely: a readiness for use that does not depend on being used.
The British Museum Great Court opens at ten on most days, and there is a version of it that exists between ten and eleven — before the school groups, before the organised tours, before the ambient crowd has built to the level where it becomes the dominant acoustic — that is worth arriving early enough to occupy.
The Foster roof is the detail everyone photographs, and it earns the photographs: the triangulated steel-and-glass canopy covering the courtyard is technically accomplished in a way that reads even to non-architects as an achievement. But what the photographs don't transmit is the quality of light it produces — diffused, grey-tinged, north-European, arriving from above at an angle that makes the Reading Room's dome look as if it were designed specifically for this illumination.
The Reading Room itself is now a temporary exhibition space, which is a loss that is well-documented and does not need re-litigating. What it retains is the form: the circular interior, the dome in cream and gold, the proportions that Marx and Lenin and Virginia Woolf worked in. You can walk around its interior on open days and understand something about why people came back to it.
London is full of this kind of interior — institutions built on the assumption that seriousness of purpose deserved seriousness of architecture. The National Gallery's dome. The Soane Museum's breakfast room, choked with natural light from above. The Wallace Collection's glass-covered courtyard, which is functionally identical to the Great Court but holds perhaps a tenth of the visitors on any given morning.
The argument for arriving at opening is not merely about crowds. It is about the particular quality of institutional interiors in their first hour — when the staff are still arranging, when the ambient life of the place has not yet accelerated into its full-day rhythm. What you encounter then is closer to what the building was designed to be.