The Rotunda Library of the Supreme Court
Frank Dorrington Ward (1885 to 1972) · 1939
Beneath the smaller of the two domes of the former Supreme Court is a circular room that lawyers once knew as the rotunda library. Bookshelves ran around the curved walls, a gallery gave access to the upper shelves, and light poured down from a ring of windows under the dome. It served the judges and advocates of the Supreme Court for more than sixty years and, before it, briefly housed a session of the Legislative Council. It is the most beautiful interior in either building, and the gallery has kept it as a space for changing displays and quiet reading rather than filling it with paintings.
Look up. The coffered dome is painted plaster, with a central oculus and a ring of rectangular windows that make the room glow on a sunny afternoon. The shelving, the balustrade of the gallery and the timber doors are original, and the round plan, unusual in a colonial office building, was a deliberate echo of the domed reading rooms of the great European libraries. The polished floor and the curve of the walls carry sound in strange ways, so a whisper on one side can be heard on the other.
During the conversion the rotunda became the home of the gallery's resource centre and archive displays, and it has been used for artists' projects that respond to the room, including sound works and installations of books. Check the floor plan on arrival for what is showing. Even when it is empty it is worth the climb: from the rotunda you can also step out to the corridors that ring the old courtrooms, and the domes of the two wings are visible from the link bridges outside.
Did You Know? The round plan and domed ceiling were modelled on the reading rooms of the great European libraries, unusual for a colonial court.
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