Guiding a visitor along the 22-foot-high, 406-foot-long curtain of glass fronting the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit hall, Caitlin Colleary spots a familiar face — one from which three large horns are protruding.
“Triceratops is here!” Colleary, a paleontologist, exclaims.
Yes, Trudy the Triceratops (as she has been nicknamed by Colleary and her colleagues) arrived a few days early in her new home — all six tons of her, perched on a platform amid tarps and wood scattered around the floor of the new hall, still eight months away from completion.
Trudy — a casting from the American Museum of Natural History in New York — was the first of her prehistoric pals to be moved into this new location in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. From here, she can stand, with a menacing look, brandishing her distinctive, three-foot-long horns.
Trudy has been placed by the glass wall of the 50,000-square-foot exhibit hall called Dynamic Earth, one of two halls under construction at the museum, and scheduled to open in December. The $150 million renovation features a second, 25,000-square-foot hall called Evolving Life, not to mention a redesign of the museum’s facade.
It’s the most significant makeover of the 104-year-old museum since it moved from downtown Cleveland to its current location in the University Circle neighborhood, near the campus of Case Western Reserve University, in 1955.
The inside and outside transformation is designed to do nothing less than reinvent the concept of a natural-history museum — starting with its appearance. The goal is to make the building, as Joshua Haney of DLR Group, the principal architect, put it, “a little less fortresslike.”
Other museums around the country are similarly transforming their buildings and exhibits to allow visitors to better, and more personally, connect with the sciences, as well as to spark greater community engagement and dialogue about how science can help address major societal issues, such as global warming.
Museums dedicated to the natural sciences — a term that encompasses a wide range of modern scientific disciplines related to the natural world, including geology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, zoology as well as paleontology — have long been associated with dark spaces and nature dioramas.
But the presence of Trudy in what is going to be a high-visibility location in the museum’s new wing is a reminder of what the biggest attractions at natural science museums are — and have been since the late 19th century, when Victorian England was captivated by the earliest specimens and renderings of what were then referred to as “impossible monsters.”
“I like to call dinosaurs the gateway drug to natural history,” said Sonia Winner, the Cleveland Museum’s president and chief executive. “You can’t have a museum like this without them. But we need to evolve, and we need to really think about how we can be civic institutions and share ideas with the community about the knowledge we’ve discovered, and even the knowledge that is still being debated.”
Indeed, dinosaurs are still prominent — on this Wednesday in late March, spring break week for public schools in Cleveland, children swarm over the spiny back of “Steggie,” the life-size stegosaurus model outside the main entrance, and gaze up in awe at “Happy” (short for Haplocanthosaurus delfsi), the 70-foot-long, 14-foot-high sauropod whose reconstructed skeleton dominates the main visitor hall.
But the ever-popular dinosaurs — a total of about 18 fossilized specimens — will now share the spotlight with some impressive new technology and architectural changes designed to connect visitors to the natural world. The goal is to do so more vividly and intimately, perhaps, than through the diaromas of nature scenes and Native Americans that were also once at the core of its exhibits (and that have now been put into storage).
The new glass wall is of a grander scale: Its 86 panels provide a transparent portal to the natural world outside — specifically, to the layers of limestone laid along the outside perimeter of the museum, to simulate the striated ledges of rock left about 12,000 years ago by the receding Laurentide Ice Sheet (the museum used as its model for this similar limestone patterns that can today be found along parts of nearby Lake Erie — itself a product of the glacier, which gouged out the Great Lakes).
The connection between the museum and that ice sheet, which covered much of what is now Ohio, is most evident in its new exterior motif, completed last October. With its gentle, wavy lines, it was created, said Mark Morris of DLR Group, its lead designer, “to mimic the flow of a glacier.” A drop-shaped feature in the middle of the facade is designed to symbolize the melting glacier, and also serves as a functioning spout, draining rainwater from the museum’s roof and into the ground.
Beyond the limestone shelves — where once stood a parking lot — the museum’s two-acre grounds have now been landscaped into a prairie of native Ohio grasses and plants, thus completing the symbolic links between the natural evolution of Northeastern Ohio and the one interpreted inside the natural history museum. The museum’s lawn now forms a kind of moraine from the receding glacier, which is depicted through the layers of stone and the glacier-inspired design of the museum itself.
The innovative new design and exhibit halls are, museum officials said, a template for a new kind of natural history museum — one that features more interactive, locally relevant and community-engaging exhibits and programming.
A nonstructural example of how that accessibility and communication with the public is encouraged here is “Scientists Unleashed,” a recently initiated program in which the 25 members of the museum’s science and curatorial staff spend five hours a week on the museum floor, answering visitor questions and occasionally offering pop-up demonstrations. “People need to have conversations with our scientists, with our staff,” said Gavin Svenson, the museum’s chief science officer. “That’s how you demystify science.”
Colleary, the paleontologist, said her hours spent on the museum’s floor, interacting with visitors, is “my favorite time of the week.”
The question of how to better engage with visitors is not only being asked in Cleveland. “Everybody’s trying to figure out the best ways to communicate science to the public,” said Cristofer Nelson, president and chief executive of the Association of Science and Technology Centers in Washington, D.C. One way, he says, is by making it local. “What we’ve found is that talking about global climate change makes the problem too big for a lot of people,” Nelson said. “So a number of natural history and science museums are focusing on how science can solve local challenges.”
In some ways, they are ideally suited for the task. “Museums like ours have the power to convene and the power to inspire,” said Tim Ritchie, president of Boston’s Museum of Science. “We need to be a place where people in our community can come together to think about what kind of a world we want.”
Erika Shugart, executive director and chief executive of the National Science Teaching Association, calls that local connection “incredibly valuable.” He added, “One of the things we know about students is that they feel more connected to learning when they do so in their community.”
Nelson cites as an example the Utah Climate Challenge, a multiplayer interactive game at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, in which visitors are invited to balance such variables as food, water and energy to manage climate change in the Salt Lake Valley.
Players gather at five touch-screen monitors while watching the effects of their decisions play out on a projected panorama of the region. “It was like you’re walking into a giant video game,” said Nelson, who visited the Utah museum recently. “That’s an example of a natural-history museum taking on a topic like climate change in a way that is locally relevant and fostering dialogue.”
At the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, one of the top priorities is helping visitors better understand the not-always-obvious natural world of their community. “We want to remind people that we’re not just a concrete jungle,” says Lori Bettison-Varga, the museum’s president and director. “There is nature in L.A., and we believe that if you have a better understanding of what’s in your backyard and your neighborhood you’ll have a much better appreciation of life on our planet.”
Thus, while their life-size dioramas of wildlife in California and the Pacific Northwest are still among the Los Angeles museum’s signature exhibits, a new area will soon be opened that reflects the latest thinking: NHM Commons, a 75,000-square-foot space that will feature a theater, a cafe and new seating and exhibition areas, serving as a sort of “front porch” to the museum.
There, said Bettison-Varga, “we hope to spark conversations around science.”
A likely conversation starter among visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, once its transformation is complete, will be an exhibit called “We’re All Stardust,” an interactive light sculpture that will anchor one of the two new halls and use infrared camera technology, a powerful game engine and projection mapping techniques to create a dramatic simulation of a supernova.
Also part of this exhibit is a feature that allows visitors to see on a large screen their own silhouettes fill up with floating particles of stardust (a reminder that we all have our origins in the elements of the stars).
But the museum knows that all the community-centered events and high-tech effects won’t be as effective without the crowd-pleasing presence of those giant extinct reptiles. In fact, only a few days after Trudy the Triceratops was relocated to her new perch, her fossilized friend, Tony the Tyrannosaurus rex (yes, he’s got a nickname too) made his grand entrance in the new exhibit hall.
Together, the two dinosaurs will help attract visitors to the new wing as they glare through the glass at the outside world — made closer in this new vision of a natural-history museum.
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