The Medicine Man gallery (left) has been reopened and a new stairway and light well installed in the Wellcome Library (right)
WHAT WE’RE DEFINITELY NOT IS DUMBED DOWN, BORING, OLD-FASHIONED, COMMERCIAL, DAUNTING OR HARD WORK
Many think of the staircase as representative of the double-helix structure of DNA. In fact, it doesn’t represent any single living thing, but its organic free- flowing shape is evocative of nature. The staircase gives you different views of the building as you climb, offering new perspectives and glimpses of our spaces. We’re excited about it – it’s the building’s signature, linking our spaces and activities and drawing our programme together.
How much did it cost? It’s a £17.5m ($26m, €24m) redevelop- ment, which came in right on budget.
What’s in the new spaces? In one of the new spaces is a thematic gallery, which means we can host exhibitons for longer. Up until now our exhibitions have been relatively short – four months maximum. One of our previous exhibitions was High
Society, which explored mind-altering drugs in history and culture. As well as heroin and cocaine, we looked at a whole range of substances, including betel nut, opium, coffee, tobacco and alcohol. Our research showed that people
wanted the opportunity to come back and visit the High Society exhibition again, but it had moved before they had time. The new thematic gallery will allow us to hold exhibitions for a year and support them with an events programme. We’ll also change the exhibition over the year with new commissions and interventions. Our first year-long show, the Institute of Sexology, has been very busy. We’ll still
©CYBERTREK 2015 AM 2 2015
have exhibits that run for a few months, but we’ll also have a larger, year-long one. Our two permanent exhibitions – Medicine Man, which is about Henry Wellcome, and Medicine Now, about contemporary medicine and culture – are on the first floor. Regular visitors who have already explored them don’t always venture upstairs anymore, so we’ve been putting much more on our upper levels to encourage those visitors to keep exploring, including a restaurant and the transformed Reading Room, which allows visitors to delve deeply into a wide range of subjects and get to grips with Wellcome’s collection. We also have a dedicated youth studio space for 14 to 19-year-olds featuring work that young people have crafted and curated themselves.
What’s the Reading Room? Part gallery, part event space, the Reading Room is at the heart of the expanded Wellcome Collection at the top of the new stairs. It’s entirely open to the public and contains strange and wonderful objects, artworks and thousands of books. AOC Architects, who designed the interior, created an experimental space for curious minds surrounded by curious things. The Reading Room bridges the programmes and exhibitions of Wellcome Collection and the extraordinary holdings of the Wellcome Library which sits within the building and holds millions of books, journals, prints and paintings connected to health. The Wellcome Library facilities
have also expanded as part of the redevelopment and we’ve undertaken an
WHO WAS SIR HENRY WELLCOME?
Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), the founder of the Wellcome Trust, was a businessman, collector and philanthropist. Wellcome co-founded a multinational pharmaceutical company that mastered modern techniques of advertising such as promotion, image and branding. The wealth that Wellcome’s company brought him allowed him to amass an astonishing collection of historical objects, which at the time of his death was larger than that of many of Europe’s most famous museums. He also funded pioneering medical research. In his lifetime, scientists funded by Wellcome made great breakthroughs into understanding how our bodies work. After his death, Wellcome’s will provided for the creation of the Wellcome Trust.
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