The tenant’s furniture.

Re-inscribing the Warburg Institute

Tim Anstey, Oslo School of Architecture and Design
[email protected]

Abstract
When the Warburg Institute was transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933 its scholars
were equipped with strong image-experiences of architectural design. This article tells the
story of how continuity and memory were created through the Warburg Institute’s ensuing
projects of architectural commissioning, addressing particularly the agency of one individual,
Gertrud Bing, who as assistant librarian of the Warburg Institute participated in the design of
its first building and who as Director oversaw the development of its last.

[Image 1]

Dear Mr Samuel,
We are simply delighted with the new design. It is absolutely what we should like to
have. Even our furniture will go into the house, and there will be space besides to store
things…1
A typical early-stage client’s letter from a rather atypical client. The writer, Gertrud Bing, is
reacting to a design from the architect Godfrey Samuel made in London during autumn 1934.
A drawing of this “Proposed Cottage at Bromley for Dr. Saxl and Dr. Bing” shows a neat
modernist house intended for the slopes of Elstree Hill. 2 The building has two storeys with
two separate entrances, one labelled “Saxl”, the other labelled “Bing”. Inside, some
ambiguity. Partly, the main functions are doubled, as if this is actually two houses – two
kitchens, two bathrooms, two dining rooms, two “book rooms”. Partly they are shared as if it
is one – a single maid’s room, a furnace room. Partly they are absent altogether – there are
bedrooms for a “guest”, a “son” and a “daughter”, but no mention of sleeping arrangements
for the clients themselves. It is a curious double/single house, for two separate-but-not-
separate people.

Dr. Bing is Gertrud Bing: 42 years old, German by birth, and Assistant Director of the
Warburg Institute. Dr. Saxl is Fritz Saxl: 44 years old, Viennese by birth, director of the same
Institute, and married with two children. The “our” in Bing’s letter refers to the sum property
of Bing and Saxl, and the letter forms part of a short correspondence for an abortive project to
build a house (without Saxl’s wife) for a new life together. That new life has been articulated
by frightening geopolitical events. The Warburg Institute has moved from Hamburg, its
activities under threat in National Socialist Germany. Furniture, reprographic equipment and
shelving have been crated and loaded onto steamers. Books have been transported to London
under the pretext of an inter-library loan to the British National Library. Bing and Saxl have
been together in England a little under a year, unpacking the library and re-establishing the
Institute’s activities.3

[Image 2]

The project for a cottage at Bromley is the fourth of six architectural projects orchestrated
around the Warburg Institute between 1922, when Saxl, as the de facto director of Warburg’s
library in Hamburg, appointed Bing to the staff as assistant librarian, and 1959 when Bing
retired as director in London. From the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg,
commissioned between 1924 and 1926, through an amazing scheme for a Hamburg
Planetarium, completed in 1930, to the re-housing of the Warburg Library at Thames House
in London in 1934; and from the cottage of 1934-35, through the sojourn of the Warburg at
the Imperial Institute Buildings in Kensington after 1937, to various proposals for a new
building developed with the University of London after 1943, architectural arrangement
occupied the directors of the Warburg Institute continuously over a 35-year span.

This article addresses the paradoxical question of how continuity and memory were created
through that process of constant architectural change. The library in Hamburg divided
Warburg’s book collection over four floors, each identified with a major theme or “problem”,
for the library’s research: “Bild” (1st floor), “Orientierung” (2nd floor), “Wort” (3rd floor) and
“Handlung”(4th floor).4 The building that was finally constructed to house the Institute in
London, completed in 1958, repeated that order: “Image” (1st floor), “Word”; (2nd floor),
“Orientation” (3rd floor) and “Action” (4th floor). In both buildings, an identity emerged
between the spatial organisation of the building and the intellectual organisation of a set of
ideas around cultural memory.5 My suggestion here will be that this formal relationship is part
of a wider pattern, and that the scholars of the Warburg Institute “furnished” their buildings
with collections of familiar objects that moved from one to another. This transference also
furnished them with particular nuances of meaning through the rituals of use in which these
objects were implicated.
The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 1924–1933

From floor to ceiling the walls were covered in books …the pantry became a stack
room, heavy shelves were hanging dangerously over doors, in the hall, on the
landings, in the drawing rooms of the family, everywhere books, books, books…6

In 1923, with Aby Warburg ill, Fritz Saxl was asked to supervise the initial designs for a new
building that would move the activities of Warburg’s library out of the confines of his home
at 16 Heilwigstraße, onto a gap-site next door. 7 Early in 1924 Saxl contacted a local architect,
Felix Ascher, who drew up plans. While this project was necessary because of the library’s
expansion, the drawings suggest that there was also a desire to re-inscribe aspects of the
library “as found”. The project followed the sectional disposition of the big, suburban villa
attached to it, and scholars were to work in the stack rooms, whose scale duplicated the
“drawing rooms of the family” next door.8 Following Warburg’s return to Hamburg late in
1924 the scheme developed. Book-stacks were quarantined off from visiting readers and
placed over four floors in a reinforced concrete bunker at the centre of the building; research
was to be undertaken in a
Lese- und Vortragssaal (reading and lecture room), projecting as a single-storey elliptical
space into the garden. 9

[Image 3]

The library was organised to resonate with the order of its container. In 1926, Warburg
annotated the floors levels of the final architectural section: Kunst, Astrologie-Religion-
Philosophie. Sprache-Geschichte, Krieg-Neuere Geschichte.10 By 1927, the final, elegant
thematic series of Bild, Orientierung, Wort, Handlung, had been defined to describe the four
levels of book stacks, the books themselves and the photographic collection.11 One might say
that the crystalline intellectual structure of the library – its idea – emerged through matching a
defined architectural organisation with a thematic and tentative order of problems. Gertrud
Bing, who had the job of thinking through the nitty-gritty of what this process actually meant,
left an acute sense of this evolution.12 She made small notes that listed out the subject sections
of the library across its various divisions. Positioned over the building plans these reveal
themselves as tracings – notations with which possible arrangements of intellectual order
could rapidly be tested against the architecture.

The relationship between architecture and bibliographic order at the KBW was modulated
also through various pieces of technology – an epidiascope in the reading room, a vacuum
postal system, book lifts and conveyor belts. This mixture of biblio-architectural order and
industrial technology created striking experiences. On completing the building Gerhard
Langmaack, the architect, was commissioned to produce a photographic album recording the
experience of its interiors. 13 Front of house, the entrance hallway details a book lift and its
associated telephone; the epidiascope dominates the reading room. Behind the scenes, an iron,
spiral staircase ascends from reading room to book stacks; the low-ceilinged stack-rooms are
presented first bare, emphasising a grid of Woolf, Netter and Jacobi “Lipman” steel shelving,
later occupied, esoteric volumes flanking narrow aisles.14

[Image 4]

Gertrud Bing, as well as developing the notation system that linked individual books to places
in the library, reported the magical effect of being inside these restricted-access rooms: “[T]he
pleasure and charm of handling the books, opening them and “browsing” as you pass along
the aisles can never be replaced by a card index,” she wrote later.15 What made this
experience? The books themselves but also the architecture and its effects. The stack-rooms,
accessible only to the staff, were lit by tube-based strip-lighting on the ceiling – “Beleuchtung
durch Röhrenlampen”.16 Both the tubes and their switching gear, “Kettenzug in den Gängen”,
or hanging cords in the aisles, are visible in photographs of the stack rooms. The Warburg
Institute commissioned blinds at the windows to keep the spaces dark, thus Bing’s “browsing”
is likely to have been dependent on this lighting.17 In 1926 Röhrenlampen could only mean
mercury vapour lamps, hard industrial fittings normally used in warehouses.18 Switching on
that lighting must have been a magic moment. Mercury vapour took some time to achieve full
illumination; the book titles would have emerged from twilight as the lamps gained their
unworldly brilliance.

Thames House, 1934-37

When the Warburg Institute was transferred to London in 1933, although the move happened
under duress, its scholars were equipped with strong image-experiences of architectural
design. While the architects they had worked with in Hamburg had been local, the Institute’s
first building project in London brought it into direct contact with a more international design
context. The architect appointed to design the interior that was to house the library was
Godfrey Samuel, of the avant-garde practice Tecton, created in 1931 by a group of
Architectural Association graduates together with the Russian émigré architect Berthold
Lubetkin. Several Tectonites, including Samuel, were members of the Modern Architecture
Research group (MARS), founded to represent British engagement at the Congrès
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne in 1933, and in their first years Tecton made a
speciality in designing accommodation for exotic arrivals in London. At the same time as they
were rehousing the Warburg Institute they were working on the iconic Penguin Pool at
London Zoo.19

Although he did not stay with the group long and had a distinguished 1930s career of his own,
Samuel was a founding member of Tecton.20 The Warburg commission probably came
through family connections. His father, Sir Herbert Samuel was the first figure of British
Jewry and previous High Commissioner for the British Mandate in Palestine. In October 1933
Samuel senior discussed the situation of the German Jews at dinner with Felix Warburg,
Aby’s brother, in New York.21 Given Felix’ engagement and Samuel’s influence, it seems
likely that the question of the library move came up.

The library was to be re-established on the ground floor of Thames House, a state-of-the-art
office-building in Westminster.22 The plan that Samuel developed, tight and symmetrical,
oriented the accommodation around a flexible–use space at the centre, serving both as a
lecture- and a reading room.23 Warburg’s idea that the main space for scientific discovery
should be identical with the main room for scientific dissemination, was reapplied.

[Image 5]

The first London manifestation of the Warburg Library was in many senses an aspirational re-
inscription of a lost space. The tables and chairs readers occupied and the surrounding built-in
bookshelves, were all moved from Hamburg. In May 1934 the epidiascope projector was re-
installed, exactly on axis as it had been there. To support it the Warburg Institute
commissioned a bespoke rostrum in oak, stained to match the transported shelving, and
curved like the back wall of the original reading room.24 The book stacks were also
transported. Encountered on a single level, they were divided into four sections in a slight
variation from the order adopted in Hamburg.25 An English metalworks, G.A. Harvey & Co,
were commissioned to produce copies of the German steel shelving to extend the shelf run.
There was a dispute when it became obvious that Harvey & Co intended to produce the
supplementary units in three feet rather than one metre modules. A po-faced letter from their
manager to Saxl, refers to “your recent information that the bays will now be 39.37079 inches
wide”.26 These Warburg art historians were capable of specifying furniture dimensions and
architectural positioning to five decimal places in order to maintain the system of order they
had created.

[Image 6]

As at the KBW the reading room at Thames House was located on a ground floor, lit by five
bays in the façade; as in Hamburg a large amount of sky was visible. In one sense, to sit here
was to sit again in the atmosphere of a building lost. But even as it re-inscribed lost interiors
Thames House created new sets of impressions. The reading room looked directly out over a
London side street, opposite Stephen Courtauld’s London Ice Club on one side (an early
1930s society magnet) and the building site for a new office development on the other.27
Looking up from a text on early Coptic sculpture (say), a reader might be confronted with a
moving advertisement on the side builders van, or the glowing yellow sign indicating a taxi
was for hire (introduced in 1934). There was something new and potent here, as there must
have been in the contrast between the bright, timber-lined reading room and that dimmer
space of book-stacks, with their raw industrial lighting and their view into a white tiled,
sanitary light-well, behind. In London the books were laid out in full view, and the
“browsing” Bing had been so enchanted by in Hamburg became the use-principle of the
library. Timber-panelled “front-of-house” and the hard, industrial “back-of-house” were now
set in a direct visual juxtaposition. This confrontation was recorded in photography, and
presented through publication, in this case as the first image in the account of the project that
Gertrud Bing published in the Library Association Record in 1934.28

Imperial Institute Buildings, 1937-1959

The Warburg Institute occupied these new premises at Thames House for only three years. By
1936 discussions were in train that led to the removal of the library to the Imperial Institute
Buildings in South Kensington. There the Warburg stayed until 1958. Its rooms formed the
context for Francis Yates’ investigations into the relations between architecture, memory and
the organisation of knowledge, published later in Giordano Bruno & the Hermetic Tradition
(1961) and The Art of Memory (1965).29 And they were the locus from which Fritz Saxl, Henri
Frankfort and Gertrud Bing, as successive directors of the Institute, worked with the
University of London on plans for a new building after 1944.30

[Image 7]

The encounter with the Imperial Institute put the Warburg Library into juxtaposition with a
third, phantasmagorical, architecture. Where Thames House had offered the open-plan floor-
plate of a modern office-building, the premises at the Imperial Institute consisted of suite of
heavily moulded, double-height rooms within a stylistically eclectic building with monstrous
flying stone staircases and monumental corridors. At first, at least, the entire contents of the
library could be swallowed by the peripheral shelving these rooms provided, meaning that its
other functions could be located in and among the books. Gertud Bing, describing the
arrangement, was emphatic that the problem of image was central to the library’s activities.
This section, now titled “Art and Archaeology”, surrounded scholars working in the main
reading room, which occupied the second, and largest space in the enfilade sequence.
“Language and Literature” occupied the walls around the third and fourth rooms, whose
centres were occupied the photographic collection, overseen by Rudolf Wittkower, and by
Anthony Blunt and his editing activities respectively. The final double-height room in the
sequence was given over to “Religion, Natural Science and Philosophy” and the mezzanine of
the very first to the “History of Social Forms”. Thus the order of sections adopted at Thames
House had been reversed.31

The superimposition of functions that this initial arrangement created was to be short lived.
The library was growing. The central areas of the various rooms began to be given over to
free standing book stacks and in 1951 the Warburg was given more space, taking over the
suite of enfilade rooms directly above those it already occupied on the ground floor.32 The
arrangement that resulted can be viewed as nightmarish or inspirational. For one young
scholar in the Institute, Sydney Anglo, it created a jack-in-the-box quality of unexpectedness.
The staff were grouped in a “bizarre atrium, set all around with office doors from which
world-famous scholars would pop out and in again – like an apotheosized cuckoo-clock”.33
The same quality of imminent surprise was created by the staircase that the Institute had
constructed to connect the spaces on the ground and first floor. It rose incongruously out of
the room previously occupied by Anthony Blunt and arrived in the middle of a new reading
room above, through a hole cut in the floor. As Anglo recalled: “it was an especial treat, when
seated there, to hear climbing footsteps of some approaching scholar, to try to guess who it
was, and to watch a learned head rising up through the opening in the floor.”34 The
organisation put the unfamiliar into very intimate juxtaposition with the familiar.

[Image 8]

This same quality of violent juxtaposition is evident also in the photographic record of the
building made following its expansion in 1952. The first floor Reading Room seems chaotic,
its central staircase clearly visible. On the lower level the juxtaposition between the industrial
and the gentlemanly, implicit at the KBW and explicit at Thames House, was compressed
brutally. Metal shelving filled the rooms entirely, surrounded by gothicky timber linings and
mezzanine balconies carried on faux-timber consoles.35 But although visually jarring, this
reorganisation re-established the idea that the library consisted of four interdisciplinary
bunkers of books disposed across four main spaces. The major sections remained those on the
image (Art and Archaeology, Room 2) and on orientation (Religion, Natural Science and
Philosophy, Room 4 – 5); the smaller those on Social and Political Life (Room 1) and
Language and Literature (Room 3). 36 In this guise the library regained some of its sense of
being a re-combinatory machine set up in an opulent architectural frame.

Woburn Square, 1945-1959

How then, were ideas about a new Warburg building gestated within the hallucinatory spaces
of the Imperial Institute? The proposal for a new building was made as part the master plan
developed by Charles Holden for London University.37 Initially the Warburg was to form part
of a low bi-institutional building with the Courtauld Institute of Art, the one institute housed
above the other. Events in the early 1950s challenged this arrangement and by 1954 a new
scheme was in place, that positioned the Warburg Institute alone on its current corner-site
terminating the vista along Torrington Place. The library was to be spread over four floors
above the reading room as it had been in Hamburg. Gertrud Bing took over the role of client
representative for the project in March 1954 and by August a final footprint was established.38
During this process, the appearance and organisation of the new building was conceived of in
very different terms by the various actors involved. For the University and its architect, a
combined Courtauld and Warburg building “should … conform in spirit to that of its ‘parent’
institution, the ‘Fogg Museum of Art’ at Harvard University”; that is, it should be low,
neoclassical and built in brick.39 For Saxl, it projected memory into the future, perhaps with
four levels as in Hamburg and “a small winding staircase […] from the reading room to the
stack rooms”.40 Henri Frankfort, who succeeded Saxl as director, was committed to organising
its library horizontally.41 Gertrud Bing sought a very different architectural mindset from that
on offer from the elderly Holden; a friend suggested younger London practices in response:
young, cutting edge, with “enough of a flexible continental mind to see what you really
need”.42

Whatever these disparate ideas about form and appearance, in the end the arrangement chosen
had resonances with several of the institute’s former homes. Mnemosyne was to be written
over the door as it had been in Hamburg.43 There was something of the KBW’s Lese- und
Vortragssaal in the classicising fenestration and modular bays of the lecture room proposed at
Woburn Square, with its quiet view of leafy gardens and a distant terrace beyond. And the
arrangement that Bing approved in 1954, which situated the Reading Room like a lighthouse,
facing London’s bustle up Torrington Place, repeated the dramatic juxtaposition created at
Thames House, where readers looked directly into the street.

Just as revealing about the way in which the Warburg scholars furnished their new home with
memories of the old are the resonances between the stack rooms at Woburn Place and those of
its Hamburg ancestor. The rooms in London were low in height and filled with stove enamel
metal shelving lit by fluorescent tubes along the aisles between them. Drop-cords were
positioned in a special arrangement directly over the ends of each book stack, the cord
threaded through a metal bracket that carried signage identifying the class marks to be found
in each section. Retrieving a book at the Warburg was a distinctive, gestural experience. One
entered the stack-room; one located the sub-heading at a distance and the class mark close-to
at the end of the stacks; one raised a hand to pull the drop-cord; one extracted the book. A
1956 technical “Diagram showing the arrangement of light fittings and switching locations”,
reveals how much thought went in to this.44 On the right hand side is an axonometric view
showing the disposition of the book stacks, the lighting cords and the signage, including the
system of class marks for locating the books. This last was not strictly of interest for the
electricians, but it was of such burning importance to at least one person involved in the
process that it had to be included. The positioning of electrical conduit, the organisation of
class marks for the library, and the haptic experience of a user of the locating a work on the
shelves are here connected.

[Image 9]

Whose mind conceived this eccentric system? The architects were not necessarily the primary
movers. Gertrud Bing’s opinion of them did not shift very much during the years of
commissioning the building.

…the architect has neither taste nor is he able to think through architectural problems
and the problems of the institution. As far as I can, I try to forestall the biggest
mistakes, but what you cannot foresee happens. I do everything I have to do – and that
is a lot and tedious – against a background of profound skepticism.45

It seems as likely that the sophistication of the final building is a result of Gertrud Bing’s
“what I have to do…against a background of profound scepticism”. Who else on the client
and design team would have been so attentive to the relation between spatial experience and
library organisation during the final design of the project in the 1950s? The experience
described on a technical drawing for the Warburg Institute in 1955 re-iterated something
discovered in the low-ceilinged stack rooms of the KBW in Hamburg, with their
Röhrenlampen, and their hanging Kettenzugen, thirty years before. At the KBW, Bing had
found a “pleasure and charm [in] handling the books, opening them and ‘browsing’ as you
pass along the aisles” among steel shelving illuminated by “flourescent tubes, strung together
directly on the ceiling between the stacks” with “operation by drop cords in the aisles”.

[Image 10]

Conclusion
In her 1934 letter to Godfrey Samuel about the abortive Elstree Hill Cottage, Gertrud Bing
was concerned with furniture, with the familiar chattels that moved and provided foundations
for patterns of a life transposed. This same minute concern emerged also in the move from the
Imperial Institute to Woburn Square during 1957–58. Schedules were made of the furniture
that could be saved.46 Instructions were issued about re-staining individual card catalogue
drawers to make sure they matched the new settings.47 Architectural projects always involve
painstaking attention to detail; but few clients enter into that detail as Bing appears to have
done. The final result of her care was a new library that seems, immediately, to have had a
lived-in quality. One where new rituals of use rapidly took on a habitual feel.

… even I am beginning to think that we shall be quite happy once routine comes into
its own again and the Institute is being used in the normal way. The library is certainly
very well provided for, spacious, well-lit, and in a short time it will be also well sign-
posted.48

The rotational journey of searching, from Reading Room catalogue to stack-room signage,
and from stack-room signage to light-switch, to shelf and back to Reading Room, made for a
powerful, haptic experiential pattern. As much as anything, perhaps, this re-inscription of the
everyday sustained the Warburg Institute’s enduring investigation into the cultural
significance of the past.
1
Autograph letter, Gertud Bing to Godfrey Samuel, December 10, 1934, RIBA Drawings Collection. Godfrey Samuel
Papers, Series 2: Projects undertaken by Samuel, 1933–1938.
2
RIBA Drawings collection. Tecton Drawings. London (Bromley): Elstree Hill, Lewisham, designs for a house for Dr Saxl
& Dr Bing, ca. 1934 [PA112/1(1-4)].
3
Eric M. Warburg, “The transfer of the Institute to England”, appendix to the Warburg Institute Annual Report 1952–53
and Elizabeth Sears, “The Warburg Institute, 1933–1944. A precarious experiment in international collaboration,” Art
Libraries Journal 38/4, 2013, 7–15.
4
Tilman von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothe Warburg (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1992), 81–90.
5
Claudia Wedepohl, “Mnemonics, Mneme and Mnemosyne: Aby Warburg’s theory of memory,” Bruniana & Campelliana
vol. 20, 2 (2014), 385–402; Carlo Ginzburg, “Une machine à pensée”, Common Knowledge: The Warburg Institute, vol
18/1, Winter 2012, 79–85.
6
Fritz Saxl, “The history of Warburg’s library (1886-1944)”, appendix to E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: an intellectual
biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), 332.
7
Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 42-52.
8
Warburg Institute Archive [WIA], I.3.1, Felix Ascher, Plans and section, Bibliothek Warburg, 1924.
9
Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 42-52.
10
WIA, I.4.8.1, Gerhard Langmaack, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, longitudinal section, autograph
annotations by Aby Warburg, c. 1926.
11
Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 192-201. Katia Mazzucco, “Images on the move. Some
notes on the Bibliothek Warburg Bildsammlung (Hamburg) and the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection (London),”
Art Libraries Journal 38/4 2013, 16-24.
12
WIA, I.4.17, Gertrud Bing, Autograph notes on positioning of library subject headings, Kulturwissenschaftliche
Bibliothek Warburg c. 1926. Warburg Institute Archive.
13
WIA 1.4.20.3, Gerhard Langmaack, Presentation Album, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 1926.
14
“Projektplan Gerhard Langmaack. Neubau Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Hamburg” Section 5, Die
technischen Einzelheiten, part o., transcribed in Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 141-143.
On Wolf, Netter & Jacobi see Regale aus Stahle, undated product catalogue, c. 1925, Wolf Netter & Jacobi Collection, The
Leo Baecke Institute Centre for Jewish History, New York, AR7212, box 1/1.
15
Gertrud Bing, “The Warburg Institute,” Library Association Record vol. 35, 4 (August, 1934), 266. See also entry by
Gertud Bing, April 29, 1927, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg vol. 2, 123: “Ich würde Heinz
Brauer deshalb den Besuch der Magazine nicht verwehren, weil bei seiner eigenwilligen Arbeitsmethode die
»Entdeckungsreisen« in d. B.W. soviel wert sind. Er hat in den letzten Wochen wichtige und ihn selbst sehr beglückende
Funde gemacht durch dieses «browsing» … ” She attributes the term “browsing” to an American researcher, Gladys
Reichard.
16
“Projektplan Gerhard Langmaack”, Section 5, part o: “Büchergestelle in den Magazinen nach System Wolf, Netter &
Jakobi. Beleuchtung durch Röhrenlampen, aneinandergereiht direkt an der Decke zwischen den Gestellen. Betätigung durch
Kettenzug in den Gängen.”
17
Entry by Gertrud Bing, March 14, 1927, Tagebuch Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg vol. 2, 73. “Ich bestelle
für die Magazine Lichtgardinen, da Signaturen und Einbände der am Fenster stehenden Bücher ganz entsetzlich unter der
Sonne leiden. Kostet leider 100 M, ist aber ganz dringend erforderlich.”
18
Arthur Aaron Bright, The electric-lamp industry. Technological change and economic development from 1800 to 1947
(New York: macmillan, 1949) 386–387.
19
John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin. Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (London: RIBA Publications, 1992), 110, 202.
20
Amongst other work, a house for the Art historian Ellis Waterhouse, Overshot Hall, Oxfordshire, with Valentine Harding,
completed in 1938.
21
Telegram, Felix Warburg to Herbert Samuel, 17 September, 1933. Jacob Rader Marcus Centre of the American Jewish
Archives Felix M. Warburg Papers Manuscript Collection No. 457, box 293/18. Samuel was hosted by Warburg at an
official dinner at the Harmonic Club Tuesday 3 October 1933, see Jewish Telegraphic Agency bulletin, October 2, 1933.
22
Elizabeth Sears, “The Warburg Institute”, 8.
23
Tecton, “Layout of the Warburg Institute at Thames House.” RIBA Drawings collection. Tecton Drawings. London
(Westminster).
24
Tecton. “Design for layout of library and working drawings for lantern stand, plans & details,” executive architect
Godfrey Samuel, 1934. RIBA Drawings collection. Tecton Drawings. London (Westminster).
25
Bing, “The Warburg Institute,” 265.
26
Letter from G.A. Harvey & Co. (London) to Fritz Saxl, January 6, 1934. RIBA Drawings collection. Godfrey Samuel
Papers, Series 2: Projects undertaken by Samuel, 1933-1938.
27
The London Ice Club opened January 14, 1927, financed commissioned by Stephen and Jack Courtauld, brothers of
Samuel Courtauld, see “Millionaire’s Ice Rink”, Canberra Times, Thursday 17 March, 1927. The adjacent office
development at Cleland House, designed by T.P. Bennetts architects, was completed in 1938.
28
Bing, The Warburg Institute, 263.
29
Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); The Art of
Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
30
Fritz Saxl was Director of the Warburg Institute until his death in 1948. Henri Frankfort from 1948 until 1954 and Gertrud
Bing from 1954 until 1959.
31
WIA,Ia.2.5, Warburg Institute, University of London. Annual Report, 1937–1938 containing Gertrud Bing’s description
of the arrangement of the Warburg Library in the Imperial Institute buildings, dated February 16, 1938. (I am indebted to
Elizabeth Sears for identifying this source).
32
Warburg Institute, University of London. Annual Report 1949-1950, November 1950, 1-2.
33
Sydney Anglo, “From South Kensington to Bloomsbury and beyond”, in Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus. The Afterlife
of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, edited by Uwe Fleckner and Peter Mack ((Hamburg: De Gruyter, 2015),
66.
34
Anglo, “From South Kensington to Bloomsbury”, 65.
35
Anglo, “From South Kensington to Bloomsbury”, 68. “an immensely tall room…with metal walkways all around, each
level reached by spiral iron staircases…”
36
Warburg Institute, University of London. Annual Report 1951–1952, November 1952, 1.
37
Richard Simpson, “Classicism and Modernity. The University of London’s Senate House,” Bulletin of the Institute of
Classical Studies vol. 43 (1999), 53-61; Eitan Karol, Charles Holden, Architect (Donnington, Lincolnshire: Shaun Tyas,
2007).
38
A developed scheme for the Warburg and Courtauld Institute located at the corner of Torrington Place and Gordon Square
and Woburn Square, requested by the Principal of the University at a Building Sub-Committee meeting on February 8, 1954
was exhibited at the Imperial Institute Buildings after March 1954. Revised drawings of the Warburg Institute only, with a
reduced footprint, were presented at a Building Sub-Committee meeting on August 12, 1954. The detailed scheme-design
was finalised by June 1955. WIA, I.7.3, Minutes of the Building sub-committee.
39
WIA, I.7.1.2, “Memorandum for the Building Sub-Committee – New Courtauld – Warburg Building,” undated copy,
almost certainly from 1945.
40
WIA, I.7.1.1, Fritz Saxl, “Needs of the Warburg Institute in connection with the projected new building for the Courtauld
and Warburg Institutes.” June 22, 1945.
41
WIA, I.7.1.1, Henri Frankfort, “Revised Schedule of Accommodation for the Warburg Institute”, June 16, 1953. Warburg
Institute Archive, “New Building” box (uncatalogued). “I have set out how I have reached a total of approximately 17,000
square feet, required for placing the library, as we wish it, undivided on one floor.”
42
WIA General Correspondence [GC], Autograph letter, W. Fankl to Gertrud Bing, March 15, 1953.
43
Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 58; WIA, GC, letter Kenneth Urquhart, Adam Holden &
Pearson to Gertrud Bing, December 17, 1957.
44
WIA, I.7.1.3, Adams Holden & Pearson. Warburg Institute, University of London, drawing no. LU7588, September 1956.
45
WIA, GC, Letter, Gertrud Bing to Walter Solmitz, December 4, 1957. “Aber der Architekt hat weder Geschmack noch ist
er im Stande architektonische Probleme und Probleme der Einrichtung wirklich durchzudenken. Soweit ich sie voraussehen
kann versuche ich den grössten Fehlern zuvorzukommen, aber was man nicht voraussehen kann passiert eben. Und ich tue
alles was ich zu tun habe – und das ist viel und mühsam – auf dem Hintergrund einer profunden Skepsis”. I am indebted to
Elizabeth Sears for this reference.
46
WIA, I.7.7.2, Adams Holden & Pearson. Warburg Institute, University of London. Schedule B. Existing furniture to be
re-used in the new building [1957].
47
WIA, GC, Letter, Gertrud Bing to Kenneth Urquhart, Adams Holden & Pearson, March 18, 1958. I am indebted to
Elizabeth Sears for this transcription.
48
Autograph letter, Gertrud Bing to Raymond Klibansky, April 25, 1958. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach A: Klibansky,
XX-XXI, 1. I am indebted to Elizabeth Sears for this reference.