Chapter 2 of 25
Project For Kiosk In British Museum Forecourt. The Forecourt Today
What I'd like to talk about are four projects all of which are located in the centre of London. My practice with Graham Morrison is based in London and the majority of our work has been carried out in the proximity of the office. Three of the projects are buildings but I wanted to start with one which isn't going to be built, and was actually prepared for an exhibition which was put on at the Heinz Gallery, the RIBA Drawings Collection in 1990, which was an exhibition which was designed to look again at the possibility of rediscovering public space in England. A number of architects were asked to look at different aspects of the city and we were given what seemed to be, initially, the rather curious task of redesigning the ice-cream kiosk in front of the British Museum.
The slide shows the state of the forecourt of the British Museum today which has, in the last ten or twenty years, gradually been taken over by the realities of what is an extraordinarily popular building. I think this year around a million people will visit the Museum. And in order to cope with those vast numbers of people the forecourt to the Museum - which was designed in the first half of the nineteenth century - has gradually been taken over by these other rather kind of extraneous elements which are necessary to the running of the Museum.
Of these elements I think the worst was the existing ice-cream kiosk which is a small Portacabin, a temporary building of no consequence which since has cluttered up the forecourt.