Central Reading Room, Barrack Street, Dundee

The Central Reading Room, located on Barrack Street in Dundee, is a library and museum building designed by James Thomson in 1909. It is constructed in the Edwardian Baroque style and consists of two stories plus a basement, situated on a slightly splayed three-sided corner site. The front features a four-stage tower and is made of cream ashlar stone, with a channelled basement and pilasters at the angles, while the rear is built of random rubble. The building has a platform slate roof.

Architectural details include a high basement course, wide pilasters with decorative cartouches at the principal angles, a plain frieze, a corbelled main cornice, and a coped attic or blocking course. The basement windows are keystoned and fitted with security grills, while the principal floor windows are architraved and pedimented, except for those on South Ward Road, which lack pediments. These windows feature timber cross-frames with leaded glazing. The attic and the first stage of the tower have small Diocletian windows with keystoned and keyblocked architraves, which are keystoned and moulded on South Ward Road.

The front elevation showcases a central entrance with two semi-glazed doors and an astragalled fanlight, framed by a keystoned and concave-splayed doorcase within an open-pedimented doorpiece, topped with a cartouche and flanked by figures. Above the doors is an astragalled round-headed stair window with a moulded architrave and an elaborately decorated keystone. This entrance is flanked by paired Ionic columns beneath an open segmental pediment. The tower rises from the wallhead at the center, featuring a corniced first stage with a window, a tall set-back second stage with paired Ionic angle columns, and a squat finialled third stage that supports a finialled and pinnacled bellcote with round-headed openings and angle colonettes.

On the Ward Road elevation, there are three windows on the basement, principal, and attic floors, with two sets of paired Ionic pilasters on the principal floor and a small door to the basement on the right. The South Ward Road elevation is similar to the Ward Road elevation but has a simpler design.

Inside, the building features a pilastered three-stage imperial staircase with columns and a corbelled cornice at the top level. The central chamber rises through two floors and includes a timber balustraded gallery and a domed rooflight.