Its story is one where intellectual endeavour mixes with creative research, struggle against poor mental health, migration, exile, the power of images and more than a hint of plutocracy in a veritable smorgasbord of contemporary concerns. Above all, the Warburg proposes an imaginative conceptual framework for investigating the history and condition of cultures across the world. The core strength of its ‘renaissance’ – a reference to the period which most engaged its founder Aby Warburg – is the way Haworth Tompkins, capably aided by Warburg Director Bill Sherman and his staff, have understood Aby’s perceptive and original intellectual agenda, folding it into the framework of Charles Holden’s building. It's the last part of his masterplan for the university and has been the Warburg's home since 1958. The result is space which invites the public to engage with that Warburg agenda, and gives the institute a face to the future – as he always intended.

Internal view of the Warburg Institute, London. Photograph ©Hufton+Crow

Born in 1866, the oldest of five brothers and two sisters in the prominent eponymous banking family of Hamburg, Aby diverted from finance and the family’s Jewish roots to pursue his interest in art and cultural history. His diversions, though, never strayed very far. Access to great wealth funded his travels, studies and purchases for his library. The second brother, Max, who became one of the richest and most prominent kaiserjude in Wilhelminian Germany, recalled after Aby’s death in 1929, that as boys they made a pact. Aby would leave running the bank to his brothers, in return for them buying any book he ever wanted: ‘It involved a very large blank cheque’.

Paul, Felix, Max, Fritz and Aby Warburg, 1929, Credit Warburg Institute

Two other brothers (Felix and Paul) married daughters of partners in the bank Kuhn, Loeb, the only real Wall Street rival to JP Morgan in the early 20th century. They also supported him through episodes of mental instability. And although Aby married outside the faith to the artist Mary Hertz, daughter of a Hamburg senator, his relations overcame their initial reservations to welcome her. Certain aspects of Jewish mysticism informed his research interests, and one of his most prominent English disciples, Frances Yates, showed how inter-related was classical, Jewish and Christian thought.

A sophisticated intellectual conception of culture (perhaps better captured in the German kultur) underlay Aby’s thought. His original name for the institute when it was located in Hamburg was the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliotek (the library for the science of culture). Fascinated by the Italian Renaissance, he explored its many aspects from painting and sculpture to its philosophy and the occult. All were manifested, he believed, in images which led to one of his most famous works, the bildnisatlas or picture atlas, where he selected iconic images to represent cultural themes whose proximities and adjacencies allowed observers to perceive connections between them for themselves.

Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the terrifying German name literally translated as institute of the science of culture, Credit Warburg institute

He more or less introduced iconography to art history, which his disciples Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich developed. His grasp of the significance and power of images went some way beyond that of his contemporary Bernard Berenson, who used image to account for attribution of artworks to individual artists. Warburg saw each work as part of a continuum in dialogue with many others, whether by the same artist or another.

Nor did Renaissance art provide his only inspiration. He consulted Albert Einstein on the trajectory of planetary orbits (itself arising from his interest in the astronomy of Johannes Kepler and its connections to Renaissance mysticism), and through that the form of the ellipse became itself a resonant symbol, inscribed in the ceiling of the original reading room in Hamburg and the ceiling of the new lecture room. Cosmology and kultur sit together.

Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Reading Room showing the ellipse in the ceiling, 1926, Credit Warburg Institute

Other interests included rituals as precursors to cultural forms, which led him to travel in the south western United States to investigate ritual dances and beliefs among native Americans. Kuhn, Loeb financed the local railway, and their connections facilitated his travel. Supplementing this unusually broad view of world culture for the time, John and Dominique de Menil (founders of the eponymous Renzo Piano-designed gallery in Houston and supporters the civil rights movement) gave part of their collection of photographs showing images of ‘the black’ in western art to the Warburg.

One of the most noted features of the institute’s library is its cataloguing system, which defies all conventions of bibliophilia and most new users find confusing (I certainly did: when unable to locate a book I asked librarian to help. ‘The title has two nouns in apposition to each other’ she admonished me (conjuring up nightmarish visions of chapter 17 of my prep school Latin textbook explaining ‘apposition’) before directing me to the correct location. Once mastered, though, the cataloguing system is wonderful, fulfilling its aim that the book you really need is the one on the shelf next to the book you are looking for.

In this sense the catalogue is a parallel to the images of the bildnisatlas. Like the images, the books are linked in an unseen, silent, implicit dialogue whose connections as much as their nodal points contain the essence of kultur which can be uncovered through diligent research. All are linked by memory, and the only word Warburg would allow to appear on the actual fabric of the Hamburg building was Mnemosyne, the name of the classical goddess of memory and mother of the nine muses.

Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (last version), Panel 46 ‘Ninfa’, 1929, Original photographic prints on a new panel

Memory persists throughout the Warburg’s history, especially in the move to London. The Warburg’s, though wealth and international connections spared them the fate of so many Jews under the Nazis, suffered humiliation and impoverishment before being allowed to leave, as did their cousins the Ephrussi, inspiration for Proust and ancestors of Edmund de Waal (whose ‘Library of Exile’ is on show at the institute), the Wittgenstein’s, the Arons/Ahrends whose members made significant contributions to culture, and many others.

The library was, if anything, slightly luckier than the family. Bill Sherman speculates on why it ended up in London rather than New York where Warburg connections were stronger, but a young cousin Siegmund Georg (advised by his father’s neighbour Konstantin von Neurath, Nazi foreign minister and defendant at the Nuremburg trial, to leave Germany) had recently arrived in London where after a slow start established the hugely successful SG Warburg and Co. Almost inevitably for a significant cultural initiative, lurking in the background, was Kenneth Clark. The institute had several homes, including within the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, before it reached its new home in Bloomsbury.

Holden’s first building for the University of London was Senate House in 1936. Built on land purchased from the Bedford Estate and donated to the University by John D Rockefeller (also a major benefactor to the nearby UCL), Sherman quips that the design makes sense when considered as the London equivalent of New York’s Rockefeller Center, but it allowed the university to consolidate in Bloomsbury, which eventually attracted more of its institutes to congregate there. When Holden presented its design at the RIBA he received plaudits from both modernists and traditionalists, but with the outpouring of radical architecture for expansion of existing and creating new universities just starting, by the late 1950s his idiom looked a bit staid.

Some aspects have aged well. Elizabeth Flower from Haworth Tompkins mentions its ‘modest formality’, evident now in the respectful composition of its dignified exterior, and internally in subtle and comfortable but not lavish detailing, such as the timber-clad columns, which their refurbishment allows to shine. It is essentially a race-track plan around a courtyard, which most of the space given over to the library with relatively small areas for teaching, staff and student study areas, and a rather dingy and forbidding entrance. Even the prospect of rescuing a very grateful Sir Ernst Gombrich when trapped by a heavy lavatory door – as Sherman remembers doing as a graduate student – could not lighten it much.

Ground First Floor Plan, Warburg Institute Architectural Drawings

First Floor Plan, Warburg Institute Architectural Drawings

But the building had other strengths. It was well built, with a robust concrete frame and relatively generous volumes which gave options for improving its thermal performance, and for reordering book storage, both essential to its ‘renaissance’. There was another more esoteric strength to the location. The original 19th century house on the site, bombed during World War II, had a Coade Stone frieze of the nine classical muses whose mother Mnemosyne was so important a figure to Warburg. It was almost as if it were beckoning the institute to Bloomsbury. Replaced without restoration in the foyer of the 1958 building, it stood for so much while its layers of grime concealed its significance. Even the enlightening powers of Warburg’s confidante and later director Gertrude Bing, Frances Yates and Sir Ernst himself did not reveal its significance.

So the raw material confronting Haworth Tompkins when they were appointed in 2018 was an extraordinary and growing intellectual legacy combined with a robust but staid building. Here another piquant and very Warburgian association takes shape, between Bildung – an untranslatable German word that refers to achieving enlightenment through cultural education – and building. Could the building offer bildung? (And behind this lurks the word Bildnis).

Fifth floor - formerly the Courtauld Institute galleries, now restored for the Slade School of Art, Warburg Institute Architectural Drawings

Haworth Tompkins rose to that implicit challenge. Their work for quirky but distinguished cultural institutions, often in quirky but distinguished buildings, such as the Royal Court Theatre, the Young Vic and the London Library, shows they can give facelifts to cultural assets without destroying their traditions. At the Warburg they clearly identified weaknesses and strengths. Among the former was the foyer, and the latter included the option to infill part of the courtyard.

The foyer is a revelation. The frieze is restored and prominently located, the entrance desk is welcoming while light and views flows through it. Sherman revels in how it now allows visual access to many parts of the building, appropriate both as a tribute to Warburg’s ability to think visually and to the aim of opening the institute to public access. There is now a small but very serviceable gallery leading both to the new lecture room within the old courtyard, and the main reading room.

Section N-S, Warburg Institute Architectural Drawings

Section E-W: colour shows new insertions

The lecture room takes the spirit of Holden’s ‘modest formality’ with enticing but not luxurious materials, an elliptical ring-beam referring to the Hamburg building – and the Gombrich family’s baby grand piano, which made its way from his native Vienna to his adopted home in London. A similar ethos runs through the reading room and the floors where the library is stored above ground with special collections in the basement.

View of the Hinrich Reemtsma Auditorium at the Warburg Institute, London. Photograph ©Hufton+Crow

The library’s disposition is another echo of Warburg’s perception of the underlying structure of culture. Divided into four overarching themes, each one has its own floor. They are image (art history), word (language literature and the transmission of texts), orientation (the transmission of thought from magic to religion, philosophy and science), and action (cultural and political history). Within all, as Gertrude Bing put it, ‘the manner of shelving the books is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted to the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend additional interest to the one he was pursuing’. Can there be any more enticing description of research?

The Warburg Renaissance is on one level a deft repositioning of a tired 1950s building. But this is a mere prelude to the intellectual riches within, and which it now helps to emanate outwards.