The Warburg Institute 翻新项目丨英国伦敦丨Haworth Tompkins

Architect：Haworth Tompkins

Location：London WC1H, UK; | ;View Map

Project Year：2024

Category：Universities

The warburg instittit ut e is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of art and culture. The institute owes its name to Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929), the scholarly scion of one of Europe’s great banking families; and it owes its mission— indeed its very existence—to the open movement of people, images and ideas. Founded in Hamburg at the turn of the twentieth century and exiled to England when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Warburg Institute became part of the University of London in 1944.

Since 1958, the Institute has been housed in the last building designed by Charles Holden as part of the University’s original Bloomsbury masterplan—where the Warburg sits at the intersection of three green squares and serves as a kind of gatehouse at the northern entrance to the campus. In 2016, the University allocated £9.5m for refurbishment and (with the help of Spacelab) agreed a basic plan for repairing the building. In 2018, the Warburg Renaissance Project was launched, turning a historic obligation for restoration into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for transformation. The new budget was set at £14.5m (with the extra £5m to come through fundraising), and a brief was created for a new competition to select the architects and design team.

The project was called the “Renaissance” not only because that was the period most intensively studied by Aby Warburg but also because it carries his conviction that the past shapes the present. In thinking about its own re-birth, the Institute considered what it would need to flflourish in the future and what had been lost or abandoned along the way. While this included more room for books, more space for students, an upgraded digital infrastructure and a more sustainable building, it also involved reviving Warburg’s radical vision for the integration of research and display and completing Charles Holden’s unfifinished plan for the site. In addition to fifixing the leaking roof and future-proofifing the space for book stacks, the project needed to deliver a new structure in the courtyard and a public-facing hub on the ground flfloor—featuring the institute’s fifirst gallery and a greatly enhanced auditorium (both inflfluenced by Warburg’s original designs).

Haworth Tompkins were the perfect fifirm for this ambitious brief. Their sympathetic approach to historic fabric, their collaborative ethos, their commitment to physical modelling and their track record in both education and the performing arts gave them everything the clients at the Institute and University were looking for. True to their style, and to the spirit of the Warburg Renaissance, they have not only built stunning new spaces but have revealed the beauty and utility that was hiding in the existing building. From the light-fifilled entrance to inspiring spaces for study and display, the Institute feels like the perfect place to work—and that is what the original founder (Aby Warburg) and the original architect (Charles Holden) wanted it to be.

This book describes the project, from overall plans to individual details, and documents both the archival research and design-thinking that have marked every step of the process. It captures the collaboration between Haworth Tompkins and the Warburg Institute, and the facilitation and inspiration provided by Tim Anstey (a long-standing student of the Warburg Institute and a close friend of both the architects and the clients in this project).

The heart of the book is a sequence of spreads addressing the key themes that became central to the Warburg Renaissance. The texts result from on-site discussions with Tim Anstey, the team from Haworth Tompkins (Graham Haworth, Dan Tassell, Elizabeth Flower, Nigel Hetherington and Laura Haylock), Paul Batty from structural engineers Price & Myers and Julian Cottrill from environmental engineers Skelly and Couch.

On 5th a pril, 2018, Haworth Tompkins received the commission as architects for the Warburg Renaissance Project. This was to be the fififth in a series of architectural reconfifigurations of the institute established by Aby Warburg since the creation of its fifirst home, the Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW), in Hamburg in 1926. The Warburg Renaissance was to emulate the collaboration between architect and institute, and the alliance of architectural and intellectual organisation, that characterised the series.

The largest of these commissions was that designed by the offifice of Charles Holden as part of their masterplan for the University of London, which gave the institute a permanent home on Woburn Square in Bloomsbury. In the 1958 project certain potentials in the symbiotic relationship Aby Warburg saw between building and “Bildung,” between architecture and the sharing of culture, were realised. The Woburn Square Warburg Institute embedded the intellectual order of its research library directly into the architecture of the building, which organised the holdings over four flfloors related to the themes in the collection. Other aspects of Warburg’s concern with architecture were played down. Holden’s design provided no space for exhibiting or sharing research other than a narrow, and narrowly conceived, lecture room. Sixty years after its construction, the diagram of the building had blurred, and the match between the library and its architectural container had lost its clarity.

The 1958 warburg instittit ute at Woburn Square was disposed as a sevenstorey building providing a ribbon of accommodation, 10m deep, around the northern three sides of its peninsular site, facing Torrington Place, Gordon Square and Woburn Square respectively. It was constructed with an in-situ reinforced concrete frame and profifiled flfloor slabs that combined reinforced concrete ribs with terracotta infifill coffers. The façade was masonry, faced by red and buff brick with re-constituted stone detailing and metal ‘W20’ section windows. Internal surfaces were painted plaster, with linoleum or woodblock flfloors. Bespoke joinery and doors were in mahogany or sapele hardwood with brass door furniture. The building was environmentally controlled by a system of radiant panels on the underside of the terracotta and reinforced concrete flfloor slabs. Ceiling heights were generous throughout (4m on the ground flfloor), providing exceptionally good natural light.

The library accommodation was disposed across the basement, ground and fifirst to fourth flfloors. Entry was from a single main door at one end of the narrow plan, at its south- east corner, and a dimly lit central corridor was a dominant experience on each level. The ground flfloor was reserved for a reading room, lecture room and teaching spaces. The fifirst to fourth flfloors combined open-access library stack rooms with staff offifices and tutorial rooms. The basement was used for periodicals, a common room and the Numismatic Collection. Unusually, for a library that contained rare and valuable books, the upper-level stack rooms were open to offifice accommodation on each flfloor, thus emphatically integrating the collection into the social life of the building. The fififth, attic storey of the building provided top-lit gallery spaces, originally designed for the Courtauld Institute of Art and currently used by the Slade School of Fine Art.

The Warburg Renaissance Project reclaims central aspects of the 1958 scheme. The existing reading room is retained and renovated. The system of matching the library holdings to themes assigned to each of the upper four levels of stack rooms is re-established. The open relation between the stack rooms, offifice spaces and teaching rooms on the upper levels is preserved. And the attic storey is brought up to current environmental and gallery lighting standards, its top-lighting system restored.

At the same time, the project opens up the plan of the building, particularly on the ground flfloor, where the dark, doubleloaded central corridor is removed. It adds accommodation by adopting previously unused space in the courtyard/light well on the south side of the building, providing two additional flfloors and an additional 330m² of accommodation. It relocates key elements in the institute’s programme, such as the photographic collection, to the lowest storey, exploiting more fully the well-lit light well “moat” surrounding the street elevations. As stipulated in the Warburg Renaissance brief, the project adds four signifificant new items of accommodation. The ground flfloor now provides a 185m² museum-standard exhibition space, the Kythera Gallery. Within the courtyard, a light well surrounds a new state-of-the-art 140-seat lecture room, the Hinrich Reemtsma Auditorium. Below this, the Wohl Reading Room provides proper facilities to researchers using the Warburg Institute Archive for the fifirst time. The archive’s holdings, fifinally, receive rack-shelving and storage designed to meet best practice archiving standards for sensitive material.

CATALOGUE

The Warburg Institute was organised around a unique cataloguing system that created thematic “places” around four overarching subjects (Image, Word, Orientation and Action), each to be given its own floor. These structures dictated the original position of all items in both the Bibliothek (library) and the Photothek (photographic archive). While its idiosyncratic system sometimes made books and images hard to find, it made the whole ensemble—in the words of the Institute’s first director, Fritz Saxl—“a body of living thought.” It was only once the Institute’s new home in Woburn Square was built, in 1958, that there was room to match the intellectual with the architectural structure. The card catalogue still captures the mind of the Institute’s founder (and indeed, holds his head, sculpted in bronze by his wife Mary): each catalogue drawer relates to a spatial position somewhere in the building.

CEILING

Working in a research library, you look down when you absorb information. You look up when you process it. Looking down, reading or writing, you encounter obscure texts or simply your laptop screen. Looking up, you encounter what?

Ceilings were important in all the Warburg Institute buildings. In the original institute in Hamburg, the most important space in the project received its own special ceiling treatment: the reading/lecture hall, elliptical in form, was covered by an elaborate ceiling with mouldings running around a central, decorative oculus. The 1957 scheme developed in London was true to the mid-century modernism of its architect, Charles Holden, creating an undisturbed plaster ceiling plane throughout the building, interrupted only by carefully placed light fittings and, in the stack rooms, by drop-cords to control illumination in separate sections of the collection. The Warburg Renaissance project re-emphasises the significance of three rooms on its public-facing ground floor, and, as in Hamburg, these receive special treatment in their ceilings. The new exhibition space and the renovated reading room use a Ligno acoustic timber system, producing a subtly textured surface and a pleasing rhythm. The new Reemtsma Auditorium, constructed within the building’s courtyard, echoes Warburg’s original ellipse in Hamburg, but imprints this onto a coffered concrete structure. These are locations where contemporary craftsmanship has been crucial. The tolerances in the exhibition room ceiling slats are less than 1mm; the lecture room concrete slab and reflecting disc were both formed on site.

CONDUIT + SLAB

As fifirst constructed, the stack rooms between the fifirst and fourth flfloors of the Warburg Institute on Woburn Square had drop cords hanging from the smooth plaster ceiling, located precisely at the ends of each shelf stack such that the books in each bay of the collection could be illuminated by a line of strip lights placed exactly over the centre of the aisle between the shelves. To achieve this, the exact layout of the shelving units, a modular system in steel, had to be defifined as part of the detailed design process for the concrete flfloor slabs that covered each storey, and of the electrical layout of the conduit that was cast into them. A detail from the working drawings for the project reveals the trouble taken to achieve this: the drawing is intended for electricians and those who laid out the shuttering for the structure of in-situ concrete planks that covered each flfloor and the terracotta coffers that spanned between them. Bibliographic organisation reached far into the material make-up the building. The Warburg Renaissance project restores the placement of shelves established in the 1958 building. In the 1990s, the stacks had been rotated 90 degrees, and carpet and under-flfloor heating introduced. All these moves were reversed in the 2024 renovation, with a return to linoleum and shorter runs of shelving, perpendicular (rather than parallel) to the perimeter wall, bringing views of windows and the natural light they allow throughout the flfloorplate. Exposed conduit carries new services across the surfaces of the original structure. The stack room ceilings provide a

DISPLAY

Aby Warburg had a strong sense of how research related to space. A principle contribution was to insist that the sharing of results was part of the research process itself. A library is not only an arsenal of books, but a public laboratory, a place where displaying your thinking plays an important role in developing it. The original Warburg Institute in Hamburg created one space for both activities: the reading room was at the same time a room for exhibitions and lectures. This pattern was reinscribed in the spaces designed for the Institute after its move to London in 1933 and continued with a series of ambitious photographic exhibitions after 1940 (displayed both at the Institute’s home in the Imperial Institute and sent as touring displays around the country). This function was lost entirely from the 1958 project at Woburn Square. The Warburg Renaissance project reinstates this combination of discovery, display and debate. On the ground floor, a dedicated exhibition area now serves to link the new lecture room, projecting into the building’s courtyard, to the newly renovated original reading room. The exhibition space is kept flexible. Suspended screens, modelled on Warburg’s original displays, allow for repeated reconfiguration.

DRAIN

All architectural projects, however esoteric, are conditioned by water, running in at the top as downpipes handle rain, and running out at the bottom as drains deal with waste. For the Warburg Institute on Woburn Square, Charles Holden’s office designed elaborate hoppers to deal with the oceans of rainwater that any London building can expect during its life; cast in lead they weigh around 40kg each. The Warburg Renaissance project was partly a detective story to understand the routes a multitude of drains took as they emerged from beneath the building and to ensure that they arrived at their appropriate destinations. Adams

DRAWING

Architectural projects leave records of all kinds of drawings. Sketches and initial proposals occupy shelves in architectural offices. Sometimes they enter museum collections as the work of architectural offices is archived in projects of disciplinary history. The Warburg Institute Archive shows another, usually lost, layer in this archaeology—dyelines of many drawings issued for sign-off during the 1950s project show mark-ups and discussions as clients and architects negotiated over details.

ELLIPSE

Warburg’s institute in Hamburg used an ellipse as the basis for the plan of its reading and lecture room. The geometry had a significance that was both intellectual and personal. Warburg’s view of the world was bipolar: life’s trajectory was a path governed by the simultaneous effect of dark and light foci; the rational and the irrational; superstition and raciocination; discipline and errantry. In his studies of the history of astrology and astronomy, the ellipse brooded as the figure that would finally account for the vagaries of the apparent motion of the planets across the sky, substituting scientific visions of the universe for equally powerful religious or mythological ones. In the Warburg Renaissance project the ellipse is reimprinted into the geometry of the new lecture room, articulated in the ceiling structure in an echo of the reading and lecture room in Hamburg. Here the figure is rendered in polished concrete around a central false oculus.

ENTRANCE

The entrance to the Warburg Institute sits slightly awkwardly at one end of the least-public façade of the building, placed on Woburn Square according to a plan for a much larger, and never-to-be built structure of which the 1958 project formed a fragment. The original entrance sequence was slightly forbidding. Blank double doors, their style reflecting Holden’s other buildings for the University of London, were surmounted by the Institute’s emblem set in stone. Entering the main interior crabwise, visitors navigated a glazed screen to approach the window of an enclosed reception kiosk, where readers’ cards were shown, or admission applied for. The Warburg Renaissance Project subtly amends this sequence, redisposing its elements and opening up the interior space, while leaving the external arrangement intact. A new reception desk, echoing that of the original Holden scheme, provides a welcoming and inspiring point of arrival; visitors standing at it can see clean across the building, into the central courtyard/light well, through the new lecture room, on across the reading room and out onto Torrington Place.

GHOSTS

Warburg famously called the study of art history “ghost stories for grown-ups,” and the architectural process of the Warburg Renaissance Project was one full of hauntings. Working on the new/old building has been an education in navigating the constant and surprising presence of the past, and indeed of past projections of the future. From its beginning the Warburg Institute was developed in relation to other structures, visible and invisible, to which its buildings referred. In Hamburg the institute occupied a gap-site beside Aby Warburg’s own home and made reference to the invisible life that went on within that apartment, hidden by a party wall, but accessible using a common lift. When an agreement was reached to construct a new building for the institute as part of London University after 1945, the Warburg was to be housed in a shared building with the Courtauld Institute of Art. The building in Bloomsbury is the built half of a much larger anticipated project to house both institutes; another imaginary structure looms alongside it. There is at least one human ghost present in the building, as well. The institute’s original librarian, Hans Meier, moved with the books to London. During intensive bombing on 17 April 1941, Meier’s home was hit and he was killed. His colleagues kept his ashes and—knowing how committed he was to the institute—mixed them into the foundations of the new building in Woburn Square some sixteen years later.

KNUCKLE

Constructed as a fragment of a much larger project, the plan of the Warburg Institute stretches around its site like a right hand making the letter “C.” The building is entered from a space between thumb and fifirst fifinger on its east façade; its fifinger tips enclose the reading room on the west side. A crucial point in this plan is the “knuckle” at the north-east corner. Here, the original project located the main riser for the building. Here now, services criss-cross, and the technologies required to run a library in 2024 are carried through a structure designed for the much simpler requirements of 1958. Invisible to visitors to the building, except as the location of a sharp left-hand swing into the exhibition area on the ground flfloor, and as the location of the toilets on the flfloors above, this knuckle was central to the successful execution of the new project. Understanding it, and the spatial planning of its contents, were key concerns.

JOINERY

The 1958 Warburg Institute was given a sense of opulence by the quality of its joinery items, set against the other more utilitarian materials that made up the palette used by Charles Holden’s offifice for their London University buildings: linoleum flfloors, painted plaster fifinishes to walls and ceilings, and clinical white tiles in wet areas. The Warburg Renaissance project matches this high-quality 1950s joinery work, using sustainably sourced sapele timber to match the detailing of screens and doors in the original building, and to form acoustic panelling on the walls of the new Reemtsma Auditorium in its courtyard.

LIGHT WELL

A major intervention in the Warburg Renaissance project involves the construction of the new Reemtsma Auditorium (above) and Wohl Reading Room (below) in the courtyard of the 1958 building. The courtyard has a curious history. Its white tiles reveal the ghost of the unbuilt project of which the Warburg Institute forms a part—the courtyard was to have been entirely internal; the white tiles were to reflect light. But they also echo a detail in the institute’s first London home, the ground floor of the monumental Thames House building on the Millbank embankment. There, as at Woburn Square, readers using the stackrooms gazed out into a white tiled light well. In the 1958 building, the glazed tiles of the courtyard, thick pieces of ceramic 6×9×1", reveal the care and craftsmanship that characterise the original design. They coordinate exactly with the window openings, whose surrounds meet the grout lines between in the tiles in a perfect match. The structure of the Reemtsma Auditorium, placed carefully within this space, is surrounded by minimal glazed roof strips, allowing light to travel down to the Wohl Reading Room at the base. The internal windows of the lecture room allow clear views across the building. The white reflective tiles now fulfill their intended function.

MATERIALS

Material selection for the 1958 and 2024 schemes for the Warburg Institute involved very different processes. Britain during the 1950s was affected by supply issues and economic austerity beginning in the years after World War II. Timber was still a product of Empire; the main joinery elements in the 1958 building are mahogany or sapele, sourced from somewhere among the British Protectorates. Almost all component manufacture was national; there was a limit on what could be obtained and the original building projects some sense of this sparseness. In 2024, materials can come from anywhere: the acoustic timber ceiling system on the ground flfloor is German, the coloured cork panels used for the flfloor in the Wohl Reading Room are Italian and the grey bricks lining the courtyard structure are Danish. As well as budget, limits on material choice must now be introduced by an awareness of the embodied energy costs associated with transport and production, an ethical response that Haworth Tomkins has been instrumental in developing across the building industry. In some cases, materials that were available in the 1950s are still logical and ethical to use: the Warburg Renaissance project uses linoleum for the stackroom flfloors as did the 1958 building. In other cases more care is needed. The choice of terrazzo for the reception desk was only made after a careful assessment of its CO2 footprint.

METERAGE

Libraries that collect physical books are an infinitely extending worm of shelving. A crucial dimension and limit is the total length that all those volumes require. The Warburg Institute, like any other library, was acutely aware of this never-ending problem, in which success in collecting always leads to problems in space. So aware, in fact, that when the institute moved to London in 1933, its director, Fritz Saxl, required English manufacturers to produce metal stack shelving in one-metre instead of 3-foot modules, so that the spatial expansion could be calculated exactly. Henri Frankfort, who succeeded Saxl, provided for the architects of the 1958 building a plan diagram that specified both the module and the density of the shelving, which in turn became a basic controlling factor in the scheme developed for Woburn Square. The Warburg Renaissance Project expands the original shelving meterage by 40%, re-establishing the layout of the stacks that characterised the 1958 building, although increasing its density slightly (the aisles between the stacks are 850mm rather than 1050mm wide). Rollerracking was also introduced for the new Archive and Special Collections store. At a time when many libraries are reducing space for physical collections, the Warburg Renaissance project creates room for several decades of future growth.

MODELS

Haworth Tompkins use large scale physical models as a central part of their design process, a method developed from their work on theatre buildings and the use of 1:25 set models to plan theatre productions. The potency of architectural models was also of signifificance to Aby Warburg and his early collaborators. For an exhibition on the history of astronomy and astrology, constructed in the Hamburg Planetarium that Warburg was instrumental in commissioning during the 1920s, peep-show dioramas were created showing interiors that themselves modelled the system of the cosmos. Like Haworth Tompkins’ “Great Model” of the Warburg Renaissance project, or indeed Adams Holden & Pearson’s model of the Bloomsbury masterplan for the University of London, these allow a public to project themselves into another time and place, using architectural means to do so.

MNEMOSYNE

Mnemosyne. Memory. Past in present. The research themes of the Warburg Institute and the institute’s continuing involvement with architectural commissioning have always been intimately linked. In the original institute building in Hamburg, “Mnemosyne” was inscribed over the entrance door in a script designed by the city architect of Hamburg, Fritz Schumacher. As the 1958 project for the institute’s London home neared completion, the director, Gertrud Bing, insisted that the name of that presiding deity (Mnemosyne was the goddess of remembrance in ancient Greece) be reinscribed on the screen that separated entrance vestibule from main reception area. Visitors entered one building about memory via the memory of another. In the Warburg Renaissance project, Mnemosyne moves further into the plan of the Warburg Institute. The inscription is now placed immediately next to the frieze of the Nine Muses, over the doorway that takes visitors from the lobby into the exhibition space. This placement creates a kind of family reunion: Mnemosyne was the mother (with Zeus) of the classical muses of all arts and sciences.

NEW BRICK

The Warburg Institute has always commissioned brick buildings. The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg was designed in a tradition of expressionist brickwork used in the city during the early years of the twentieth century, its façade combining references to the industrial architecture of warehouses with features familiar from suburban Jugend villas. (This system of expression also inspired Charles Holden, later architect of the London Warburg Institute, who travelled to Hamburg to study its brick expressionism in 1930). In their brief to Holden, the University of London decreed that the London institute was to be “red brick with stone dressings.” In both cases the brick used was local, London and Hamburg sharing a winding river-valley location surrounded by the clay beds that the geology of such locations produce. The Warburg Renaissance Project continues this tradition of brick construction in its only area of new exterior façade. The south elevation of the Reemtsma Auditorium uses a Petersen brick, perforated in places as a brise-soleil to its windows. In 2024 the brick comes from further afifield, from Broager in Denmark. But the bond repeats that on the main façades of the 1958 building, and its dove-grey tone coordinates with the hues of the surrounding light well tiles and the original concrete surrounds to the courtyard windows.

RADIATOR

One of the most complex issues in architectural re-use is how to meet current requirements relating to climatic control and energy consumption in buildings developed before those requirements were in place. Often there is a minimum or a maximum strategy to be adopted: signifificant alteration in terms of mechanical systems, additional insulation or upgrades to elements such as windows, versus minimal alteration. The Warburg Renaissance project takes the minimal approach. The building remains naturally ventilated except in new-build areas and locations such as the exhibition area, where some mechanical back-up is essential to meet museum conservation requirements. Secondary glazing to the original single-glazed windows is added internally. One area that required careful thought was the heating strategy. The 1958 project was heated and cooled through water pipes cast into the underside of the flfloor slabs, producing radiant panels in the ceilings intended to control the temperature on the flfloors below them. In replacing this system (which no longer functioned) with more conventional radiator units beneath the windows, the team had to negotiate the fact that the windowsills across the various flfloors of the building change level. A small essay in component selection ensued, fifinding elements that fifitted the varying heights, were aesthetically acceptable, and which provided suffificient power.

SLADE

The post-war building for the Warburg Institute was to have been much larger and was to have also housed a non-identical twin, the Courtauld Institute of Art (founded one year before the Warburg arrived in London and similarly associated with London University). The histories of these two organisations are linked. Samuel Courtauld, who made the endowment that established the Courtauld, supported the Warburg Institute as well; the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, now in its 86th year, remains one of the most respected in its field. When plans for a combined institutional building were abandoned in the late 1950s, one aspect of the twinning was kept. From Gordon Square, one can see that the top storey of the Warburg Institute provides a set of top-lit spaces directly under a collection of roof glazing. These were designed to house the art collection bequeathed to the University by Lord Lee of Fareham, also a key supporter of the initiative to create a common centre for art-historical research in London. The terms of his bequest, which provided much of the funding for the new building, were that a combined home for the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes should house his paintings and Warburg’s library. The library occupied the lower five storeys. Lee’s collection, donated to the Courtauld Institute, occupied the top level—accessed through a separate ground level entrance with a dedicated goods lift. By 1990, these spaces had been taken over by the Slade School of Art and since then have provided generations of art students with a hidden eyrie in the heart of the city. The Warburg Renaissance project, in collaboration with the Slade School, included the renovation of these neglected spaces, reinstating daylighting to the studios and providing a much-needed boost to this space for artistic practice.

STAIR

As a vertically organised building, the Warburg Institute is mortgaged to the quality of its staircases, a condition that also characterised the four-level library in its fifirst articulation. Where the Institute’s original home in Hamburg contained a steel spiral stair linking stack rooms and reading room, in the Woburn Square building the staircases provided casual meeting-places for staff and housed art works central to the institute’s identity. Because they are constructed in very high-quality materials, these spaces have required very little restoration in the Warburg Renaissance Project. Outside the building more alterations were needed. Replacing a defunct fifire stair on the west elevation of the internal courtyard, an opportunity arose for light-footed structural engineering. The reconstructed stair cantilevers out before the courtyard lecture room, its weight taken on a single steel column, leaving the landings free from visual obstructions.

WINDOW

At its completion in 1958, the Warburg Institute project received indifferent reviews from the architectural critics of the time. Writing in the Manchester Guardian, Nicholas Pevsner compared the building to a telephone exchange. These reservations reflect the low-key, aesthetically conservative and apparently standardised quality of its three free façades. There is something of the Giles Gilbert-Scott telephone box about the building’s window proportions; repetition dominates the façades, while a pared-down classical scheme of brickwork relief and white concrete string-course banding reduces its effect. In detail, however, a bespoke quality shines through this utilitarian composition, a quality that appears more valuable in the 2020s than it did in the 1950s. A final area of subtle enjoyment for the project team came as they examined the familiar profile of the W20 window-sections used throughout the 1950s building. While this system, in its standardised form, uses metal beading to retain windowpanes, the Warburg Institute uses a subtle variation that slightly softens the industrial lines of the system. Here, metal angles are replaced with hardwood glazing beads with minimally radiused corners on their ¾" section. The effect is almost invisible but introduces a mnemonical depth into the experience. The windows distil into their design a family of previous glazed openings through which Warburg Institute readers have observed the world, from the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, constructed during the 1920s, through the heavy neoclassical façades of Thames House on Millbank in London, where the Institute was based during the 1930s, to the eclectic and monumental windows of the Imperial Institute in Kensington, in which the plans for the building on Woburn Square came to fruition during the 1940s. In the Warburg Renaissance project these softened W20 windows are retained, cleaned and repainted. In this case, renaissance comes through the simple touch of routine building maintenance. Elsewhere, in new elements such as the lecture room and associated glazed roof to its surrounding light well, high-quality contemporary window systems have been used, to maximise sightlines and to sympathise with the aesthetic that binds the new and the original parts of the building together. For the first time, window openings on opposite sides of the building provide interior views that stretch from one façade to the other, connecting staff, students and readers with the trees and traffic outside.

the building as we found it it was extremely original; much of the 1950s fabric was intact and apart from a small infill extension at the rear, the building had been untouched since the Warburg took occupation in 1958.

Charles Holden, the architect of the building, used a pared back modern classical style that reflects some of the neo-Georgian work of Hubert Lidbetter at Friends House nearby, and elements of Grey Wornum’s more extreme stripped classical style at the RIBA headquarters, but also echoes an interest at the time in England in north European architects such as Asplund.

As an institution, the Warburg has retained the feeling of the bespoke, inherited from the original foundations in Hamburg, with a genuine and personal attention to detail. In some areas the Institute has stood still and the fabric, which has changed very little, contains all the authenticity and mild idiosyncrasies of a historic institution.

In others, advances in new technologies have made specifific demands on the architecture, which have not always been successfully resolved. The top flfloor of the building originally contained the Courtauld Institute of Art, now the Slade School of Fine Art, under a series of sloping rooflflights, and this also formed part of our project scope.Interestingly, the building was quite poorly received upon completion and was seen to be of a low architectural standard by the architectural press. Time has been a kinder critic and today the building is seen as an intact example of its period, and is considered by those that use it to be easy and comfortable to work in. The building was generally in good repair and worked well as a library and study centre. It was clear to me that its strength lay in the quality of its originality; it was period correct, and what was needed was an inventive ‘refresh’ rather than radical change. The opportunities appeared to lie in bringing the programme of the Warburg as a teaching institution into focus and to update the building to support this in ways that respected its inherent qualities and strengths. It lacked some key facilities such as an adequate lecture theatre and space for exhibitions, gatherings and display, and it needed to adapt to accommodate different technologies, teaching and research methods that had developed since it came into being. Renaissance (or rebirth) became the title for the project and perfectly captured the essence of the challenge.

Whilst I knew that we needed to somehow preserve the building’s key characteristics, we also needed to celebrate the Warburg as a cultural institution and an extra layer of cultural amplifification came through conversations with Warburg Director Bill Sherman. He shared with us the history of the Institute, the relevance of the ellipse in the original building in Hamburg and the German concept of Denkraum—space for ideas and exchange.

These themes informed key concepts in our physical designs, with the intention of using the new interventions to stitch together the existing spaces and improve circulation flflow in the public areas of the building. Our main addition was a new lecture space with an elliptical roof form and a Special Collections study area below it in the central courtyard, and a general de-silting of the lower flfloors. The perimeter, previously a closed offifice corridor, was opened with a new gallery space creating a more generous route to the main reading room, making the activities within the building more visible and welcoming from the street.

We have tried to create a series of spaces that serve the Warburg’s traditional vocation of facilitating knowledge, encounter and exchange, and to express this in the architecture, with a material language that resonates with the original qualities of Holden’s design. We collected a selection of image fragments including an original copper ticket holder by Holden and an abstract model of one of his seminal tube station designs for London Underground, that acted as reference points for us to create proposals that work with the building’s mid-century classical modernism.

Team:

Client: The University of London and the Warburg Institute

Architects: Haworth Tompkins Architects

Design: Oliver Long and Scout Curlewis

Editors: Tim Anstey, Bill Sherman, Dan Tassell

Structural Engineers: Price & Myers

Services Engineers: Skelly & Couch

Project Manager: Artelia

Main Contractor: Quinn Heritage

Project Team:

Warburg Institute: Bill Sherman, Madisson Brown, Peter Lin, Giles Mandelbrote, Clare Lappin

University of London: David Byron, Emel Kus, Kevin Roberts, Lee Winters, Melissa Styron

Haworth Tompkins: Dan Tassell, Elizabeth Flower, Ellie Sampson, Graham Haworth, Harriet Mulcahy, Hugo Braddick, Jonathan Rees, Laura Haylock, Nigel Hetherington, Toby Johnson

Price & Myers: Gemma Carey, James Stevenson, Paul Batty, Yousef Azizi

Skelly & Couch: Julie Arneson, Julian Cottrill, Tristan Couch

Artelia: Conor Coley, Fion Tsen, James Illsley, Simon Cash

Quinn Heritage: Alex Butt, Andrew Williams, Gary Shead, Ian Lock, Ionut Alexa, Paul Marston, Pip White, Rob Davies, Simon Eddison

Photographers: Hufton + Crow, Helene Binet, Fred Howarth

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