It's not uncommon to see today entire libraries or reading rooms being partially dismantled and turned into computer laboratories or being simply abandoned to themselves, without offering visitors intriguing environments where they may be inspired to carry out their researches. This can't be said about the Reading Room and Library at the Wellcome Collection in London (183 Euston Road).
Located at the end of an asymmetrical spiral staircase, the library allows visitors to study, draw, play boardgames, use their computers sitting on comfortable floor cushions scattered along a staircase (note: seating and floor cushions are upholstered in a pale green and red fabric with a pattern based on a design for the 1951 Festival of Britain depicting the structure of insulin cells; London-based architects AOC designed the clever furniture in these spaces) or simply take a break and wander around, discovering a German Pohl Omniskop X-ray Machine dated 1925, paintings, sculptures and other objects scattered around these spaces.
The contents of the library and reading room perfectly match with the essence of the collection of scientific, cultural and medical objects put together by Wisconsin-born pharmacologist-entrepreneur and co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co. Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) and his successors (the objects on display in these spaces and in the Wellcome Collection cover a series of disciplines, from medicine to history and anthropology, with some bits and pieces that should be filed under the mere grotesque...).
Visitors are prompted to do their researches and make the due connections in a playful environment that encourages openness and a hybridic exchange between different disciplines. Fashion fans and designers won't be disappointed as there's something for them as well - the "Closing Neural Tube Dress", a column-like fake fur gown in a tomato red shade. The piece, a 2014 copy of the 1997 original by British designer Helen Storey and her embryologist sister Kate - is part of a wider project entitled "Primitive Streak" and illustrates an early phase of neural development.
Apart from researching and reading, if you're a pioneering fashion designer, you may also try on the straitjackets available in the reading room, or maybe ponder a bit more about life and death through the vanitas paintings (or the vanitas tableaux in the Wellcome Collection's "Medicine Man" display on the Second Floor): these depictions can indeed remind us about the eternal dichotomy between human mortality and vanity and maybe push us to contemplate and reconsider the real values in our lives (food for thought, especially for all the people working in the fashion industry...).
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