London | Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre | HOK

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05 September 2008

By Tony McIntyre

The second phase of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre takes a startling approach to the storage of the insect specimen collection, writes Tony McIntyre

It doesn’t make much of an impression just now, but when the site huts and scaffolding are cleared away, and the garden facing Queen’s Gate is brought into trim, the Natural History Museum’s latest addition will offer a surprising sight: one of London’s largest metaphors.
The first phase of the museum’s expansion and modernisation programme, known as the Darwin Centre, was designed by HOK and opened in 2002. It contains work space for scientists, and 22 million animals bottled in alcohol. It’s a fairly standard piece of worthy modern building, vaguely techy and apparently just what the museum wanted.
Phase two was put out to international competition, and won by the Danish firm of CF Møller in 2001. This building links the monumental terracotta-clad Waterhouse building, designed in the 1870s, with the steel-and-glass HOK extension.
The brief for this 16,000sq m project is subtly different from phase one. Storage of specimens in a properly controlled environment (17ºC, 45% relative humidity) forms a quarter of the building’s area (but these are dry specimens, in cabinets — 17 million entomological and 3 million biological specimens), with an equal area of lab space for more than 200 scientists that will be finished in January.
But in return for funding half of this £78 million project, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Department for Culture, Media & Sport and the Wellcome Trust want to see the museum engaging the public’s interest in a more immediate way than just browsing cased specimens. The museum too wants people to know that its collection is a working library and laboratory. The design became about demonstrating this. Substantial parts of the lab areas will be open to public view, and larger parts of the collection than ever before will be viewable when the public areas open in autumn 2009. But the big surprise comes with the specimen storage archive, a vast eight-storey concrete cocoon sitting right at the heart of the plan.
This is the metaphor everyone uses, the cocoon, and it works: a huge store of biological resources waiting to be turned into knowledge, with the top two floors set up as exhibition space, cave-like and primitive. What makes this more striking is that Møller is by no means renowned for funky architecture; its work is solid and Scandinavian. In fact, apart from the cocoon — sprayed concrete finished with polished plaster — the building follows that path.
“The cocoon squeezes onto this polite space like a giant tumour”


Facing Queen’s Gate is a tall fritted glass wall; above, a roof of ETFE. Floors are Portland stone, everything is in tones of grey and beige. It is very well done. It is sober. There are beautiful details like the seven-storey steel columns along the front, each specially fabricated as a single piece to avoid the distressing vulgarity of joints. The cocoon squeezes onto this polite space like a giant tumour, a pregnant bulge for an unknown future.
This archive is only partly like a library; there is no industry publishing new species every year, so no requirement for expansion. The space can be definite. So the 3,500sq m of its surface is criss-crossed by recessed expansion joints to give the idea of filaments binding the whole thing together.
In an architectural Olympics, the construction of this object would have a really high rating of technical difficulty — right up there in the nines. But the judges would have to deduct a few points: the expansion joints have the occasional alarming wobble, and the curved plaster sometimes goes a bit flat. But the cocoon is a brilliant conceit within a well thought-out and detailed framework.
This object is inevitably and intentionally the centre of attention; it is there to see from the street and overwhelms you as you walk beside it in the tall narrow circulation slot that runs from the Waterhouse building north to HOK’s effort. No doubt both architect and client were aware of the need to indicate that this is only a fraction of the building’s area. Since the labs have no street facade — the building puts all its aesthetic efforts into this one gesture — other devices show that science is doing its everyday, and sometimes extraordinary, things. Hence the exquisite windows in the upper level visitor space that look into the working labs, and a variety of “glimpse” opportunities. Circulation routes for public and scientists don’t cross, but at many places are visible to each other.
How much attention Møller paid to the Waterhouse building is difficult to judge such is the quietness of its aesthetic moves. There is a modern equivalence of sheet glass with the self-cleaning and ultra-durable terracotta used by the Victorian, though terracotta is a plastic material and could be moulded into the Romanesque detail required by Waterhouse.
The closest this building comes to picking up on the original, ruthlessly symmetrical building is in its use of glazed roof and exposed steel, together with some rather good bridging between the cocoon and its enclosing volume. But where Waterhouse played with natural figures as decoration, Møller takes that challenge and discretely wraps it up inside a cocoon — future generations of architects will have to see what kind of metamorphosis is possible.

Fonte: Bdonline