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Reimagining the Western Range of the British Museum

By Philip Jodidio - 2 March 2026

Already recognized as one of the most original new architects, at the age of 45 Lina Ghotmeh won the open competition to redesign the British Museum’s range of galleries located to the west of the Great Court, which Norman Foster created in 2000. The Western Range displays ancient works from Egypt, Greece, Rome, Assyria and the Middle East. The galleries and technical spaces concerned have an area of 15,650 sq. m.

Lina Ghotmeh, born in Beirut in 1980, studied at the American University in that city, where she considered specializing in archeology. Instead, she went to Paris, where she earned a degree at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in 2003, going on to become an associate professor there between 2008 and 2015, even as she studied to obtain her Master’s degree. Between 2001 and 2005, she worked in the offices of Jean Nouvel in Paris and Foster + Partners in London. In 2006, she established the Dorell Ghotmeh Tane office with architects Dan Dorrell and Tsuyoshi Tane, after winning the competition to design the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, completed in 2016. The same year, she created her own studio Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture in Paris. Since that time, Ghotmeh completed the residential Stone Garden building (Beirut, Lebanon, 2020), the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens (London, 2023), and the Maroquinerie Hermès production facility (Louviers, France, 2023), among other projects. More recently, she completed the Bahrain Pavilion at Osaka 2025 and has been selected to build a new pavilion for Qatar in the Giardini, where the Biennale is held in Venice.

She has served as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture in 2021 and held the Gehry Chair at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in 2021-2022. She co-presides the French Ministry of Culture’s ARCHES...