Funworld September 2009

London’s Natural History Museum is renowned for its top-notch theming and design, as evidenced here by the facility’s “Visions of Earth” exhibit.

Visit London today and you might be forgiven for thinking aliens have landed in the city and transplanted a huge cocoon next to the Natural History Museum (NHM). It’s as clear as the giant glass box wrapped around the eight-story-high cocoon this is no ordinary museum extension.

The new Darwin Centre 2, due to debut Sept. 15, is the latest stage in the Natural History Museum’s metamorphosis. It fittingly opens as the institution marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the legacy of his theory of evolution (www.darwin200.org).

Created at a cost of £78 million (US$127 million), the second phase of the Darwin Centre building completes the most significant development at the museum since it moved to South Kensington in 1881. The first phase, housing the museum’s 22 million zoological specimens, opened in 2002. The Darwin Centre’s space-age cocoon will safeguard an additional 20 million insect and plant specimens from the NHM’s 70-million-strong collection. The precious cargo, assembled over three centuries of exploration, includes specimens collected by Captain Cook and Charles Darwin. And that’s just the start of the story.

“The Darwin Centre catapults us into the 21st century,” says Audrey O’Connell, head of planning and design consulting at the museum. “People already know of the Natural History Museum as a beautiful building in London with impressive exhibitions, but what they don’t always cotton on to is that we’re a world-leading science research center.

“The museum needs to be competitive,” she continues, “so we made the conscious decision that ‘we’re not two institutions; we’re one museum.’ The second phase of the Darwin Centre reflects that dual role and brings our science work to the forefront.

“It’s a multipurpose building,” explains O’Connell. “We’re creating collections storage and laboratories that will set new standards and make the specimens fully accessible to scientists. Physically, the building is iconic. Standing under that concrete cocoon is completely awesome. It’s simple and it’s massive. Even children who might not care about the architecture will be dumbstruck by the experience of being in that space. It’s very tactile, and, because of all the glass, you have different views of the museum’s Wildlife Garden and London outside. Ultimately, we’re choosing to let visitors slip behind the scenes and see the collections in big numbers; we’re talking 2,500 visitors a day.”

The bright and minimalist second phase of the Darwin Centre—designed by Scandinavian architects CF Møller and built by HBG UK Ltd.—will literally open up the museum’s Victorian Waterhouse Building. The aim is to shake up the public’s perception of a museum as a static collection. Just as the “CSI” TV series showed forensic scientists in a new light, so the Darwin Centre will allow visitors to watch some of the museum’s 220 science detectives in action.

“People know that museums collect stuff and then put it in drawers, but I’m not sure they understand what those collections are for,” says O’Connell. “When I was younger I didn’t realize scientists studied them to learn about disease, climate change, and all kinds of things to help find solutions for the problems of today. It’s about using information from the past to actually make a change; to make our lives better and the planet healthier. The fact that we have this amazing new place where people can see research happening in real time shows that as an organization we’re on the move.”

Phase one of the Darwin Centre laid the groundwork for the behind-the-scenes approach with “Nature Live.” This daily program of talks—also broadcast online—gives visitors the chance to hear firsthand from scientists on topics ranging from virus hunting and reconstructing lost worlds to the grisly task of preparing animal corpses for the collection.

“People who live in London expect a changing program, and to compete for their time we need to be current,” says O’Connell. “The difference between putting a real scientist in front of the public, versus an educator who is just talking about the work, is that scientists are passionate about their beetles, their lichen, their sharks, or their microbes. It’s very genuine, and that really comes across. When you go inside the cocoon what you’re seeing isn’t staged. You’re seeing scientists at work every day in their actual environment.”

In the digital age, the real thing is still a powerful draw, says O’Connell. “Social media is mushrooming, and museums have to go that way. We have a strong interactive media department that is developing lots of new exhibits for the floor and expanding our web site to a sophisticated extent. But, on the other hand, museums have an opportunity to differentiate themselves by showing off their collections.

“Kids who go into our bird gallery downstairs will stop and look and be enthralled by the birds. Museums have a great opportunity to increase their displays of real objects and to use that as a unique selling point for their organization. It’s different from a theme park or any other attraction experience: seeing the real thing, seeing a scientist working to solve a problem, or bringing in an object that you’ve found and asking a scientist what it is, or why it died.”

Entertaining attractions like “Nature Live” and the Darwin Centre, O’Connell says, will help the NHM inspire visitors, fulfilling its mission as advocate for the natural world at a time when 200 species are added to the endangered list annually. Also, sustaining audiences is crucial for a museum that hasn’t charged for admission since December 2001 (the NHM welcomes close to 4 million people a year). The organization depends heavily on revenue earning activities, including retailing and catering to supplement government grant-in-aid support.

“One of our values is fun, so we’re not steeped in formality,” says O’Connell. “We’ve never been afraid of bringing in entertainment. Certainly, the public loves it. I’m not sure whether our scientists have always loved it, but we have a lot of scientists behind us. Our senior paleontologist, Angela Milner, worked closely on our dinosaur hall, which has been really successful and has a robotic dinosaur in it.

“The museum is very willing to try new things out, although we’re a bit braver with entertainment as part of our temporary exhibitions program,” she says. “Of course, it depends on what you consider to be entertaining; we don’t have popcorn machines or games. We are a museum and we try to keep the balance right. We’re very interested in attracting visitors and providing a fun day out, but we also want to give families something to think about when they go home. Hopefully, they will go onto our web site and dig deeper into the different subject areas.

“We need to demonstrate through our offer that we’re irresistible and that we’re not at all what you’d expect a museum to be,” she says, “because ‘museum’ is a funny word that can prevent some people from coming in the door. That’s why I’ve enjoyed going to the IAAPA conferences— seeing the wealth of ways that attractions engage with people, and thinking about where we can apply some of those techniques and adapting them to fit.”

Like the scientific community, museums should feel confident enough to experiment with new ideas and learn from the outcomes, O’Connell believes. “We should be free enough not to be threatened by other kinds of attractions, but to know our place, to know our mission, and then to test it. That’s what we’re doing with our exhibitions and programs, and that’s what we’re doing with the Darwin Centre. We need to be as fresh as we can be to survive.”

Juliana Gilling is a specialist attractions journalist. E-mail: julianagilling@gmail.com.