When is aggressive underground expansionism not aggressive underground expansionism? When it’s housing a Viking warship. The British Museum has just become part of the “iceberg” trend that has long been sweeping London — buildings whose major square footage resides underground. But don’t accuse them of standing alongside the billionaires who are forever trying to build more underground cinemas and swimming pools.
Star architect Graham Stirk, who designed the sexily titled World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, the new extension to the British Museum, put 60 per cent of it underground, “We had to dig down because we had no alternative and were creating a working building,” he said, at a British Museum talk this weekend. But... “residential dig-downs are another matter. There is no case for them. And I cannot imagine anything more tedious than working out in a gym underground.” The architect went on to joke that he hadn’t expected to have to create space for such a vast, Nordic centrepiece. “I thought they might start with showing something like a coin collection,” laughed Stirk, “not the largest object ever displayed there — the remains of the longest Viking ship ever found.” That’s one hell of an erg.
