Darwin Centre, Phase 2, Europe

14 July 2010

Darwin Centre, Phase 2, Europe

An iconic cocoon has been created as the second phase of The Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre, and is Europe’s largest concrete curved structure. It houses millions of insect and plant specimens, some collected by Darwin himself

Details

Project: Darwin Centre, Phase 2
Architecture: C F Møller Architects
Lighting design: Sutton Vane Associates
Size: 16,000 sq m
Completion time: 30 months

Project Description

The £78m second phase of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre, designed by Danish architect CF Møller, is the most significant development of the museum since 1881. Not only is it a huge visitor attraction, but it is also a working research facility with some 200 scientists working in 1,040 sq m of hi-tech laboratory space, visible to the public.

The new building is home to about 17 million insect and three million plant specimens including some irreplaceable examples collected by Charles Darwin himself, and others dating back to the 17th century.

It would clearly be a disaster if the collection were to fall prey to infestation by the so-called museum beetle or were to be damaged by humidity. The architectural solution was to house the collection in an eight-storey concrete cocoon, which at 60m long, 12m wide and covering an area of 3,500 sq m, is the largest sprayed concrete, curved structure in Europe. The 30cm-thick shell creates a stable interior thermal environment, kept at a steady 17°C and 45 per cent relative humidity, the optimum conditions to store ‘dry’ collections.

The cocoon has an obvious symbolism and its immensity helps to convey the size of the collection inside, but it is also so large that it cannot be seen in its entirety from any angle. This presented an intriguing challenge to Sutton Vane Associates, which had the job of enhancing the visitor experience through lighting in public circulation and reception areas, the Attenborough Studio audio-visual theatre, and exhibition areas.

Sutton Vane Associates’ response was to house LEDs in an 85m-long trough so that they ‘wash’ up its curved base and over the reflective surface of a mix of concrete and marble powder, helping to humanise its scale during the day and adding magic at night when the museum hosts events.

Visitors follow a route up and through the cocoon that enables them for the first time to watch the National History Museum’s scientists from viewing decks as they prepare specimens and carry out research amid 3.3km of cabinets – enough to stretch from Kensington to Westminster. Two of the eight floors are devoted to exhibition areas and the Attenborough Studio, which was designed by Pentagram Design.

Exhibition designer At Large designed all of what’s known as the ‘public offer’ areas, which includes all of the exhibition spaces inside and outside the cocoon.

‘Our plan was to present the vitality and activity of a real working environment so that visitors understand that science relevant to them happens in the museum,’ says At Large designer Ned Phillips. At Large took on the interior of the cocoon as an empty concrete shell and created a series of walkways and displays.

Visitors can enter the cocoon on the seventh floor by a glass bridge and work their way down via a series of ramps. Between these ramps are niches containing interactive exhibits. The floor inside the cocoon is epoxy resin, which is perfect for creating a seamless, sloping surface as well as being very hardwearing.

The Darwin Centre is aimed at a slightly older demographic than the main Natural History Museum, as many of the exhibits deal with quite complex science. To help guide visitors, At Large used LCD screens, built into walls and fitted on to tables.

‘One principle was that if you want to know about something you touch it,’ says Phillips. ‘That could be an object or an area in front of a glass display case fitted with a touch sensor, transparent touch foils fitted to the actual glass of the display cases or, in some cases, when you open a book it will trigger a sensor and a scientist will appear on screen saying something like “I see you’ve opened my thesis on…”’

Many of the multimedia exhibits comprise sections of text printed directly on to an aluminium composite material called Alucobond. The material was folded into what Phillips describes as ‘cassette shapes’, which were hung directly on to the raw concrete interior walls of the cocoon. Many of these are imbedded with LCD screens.

On the ground floor of the cocoon there is a curved, 12m long ‘image wall’, comprising a series of LCD screens placed behind a glass wall. This is linked to the lighting system by Sutton Vane Associates, so that, when the screens shows a desert, for example, the lighting becomes an sandy orange colour, and when the screen shows the ocean, the lighting is blue.

‘The technical challenge here lay in creating the right interface and the right banks of LEDs that light the wall,’ explains practice principal Mark Sutton Vane, ‘while the aesthetic choice included making the edges of the images blur slightly to give the whole display visual integrity’.

Inside the cocoon, the lighting scheme had to take account of the lighting provided as part of the base build. Sutton Vane says: ‘It very quickly became clear that we should keep the inner walls as free as possible from visual clutter to preserve the architect’s design intent as far as possible and so that they could be used for projections.’

Fluorescents are used on the visitor route, where they are housed in specially engineered kickproof and childproof steel casing at floor level, designed to angle the light down and across the ramp and thereby avoiding glare and not detracting from the exhibits.

On the ground floor, the 64-seat Attenborough Studio has four layers of lighting to suit uses that range from talks to film shows. The house lighting reuses the fluorescent lighting installed as part of the base build, with Sutton Vane Associates adding fully dimmable, low-voltage IRC tungsten halogen and an LED-based system designed to produce dramatic colour-changing effects, and specifying a full theatrical lighting rig. LED lighting is used for wayfinding and safety lighting.

‘A project such as Phase Two of the Darwin Centre involves a range of lighting design challenges,’ says Sutton Vane. ‘But it also gives us the opportunity to use lighting technology to its best advantage and to really enhance the visitor experience.