An Amazing Eight Story Cocoon at the Natural History Museum

Written by Edward Rothstein Thursday, 08 April 2010 21:02

LONDON — There is something daring, almost provocative, about the Cocoon. This eight-story-high egg-shaped structure, which contains major new exhibition space along with scientific-research facilities, is housed in an enormous glass-and-steel box. It is annexed to the Natural History Museum here as if it were a gigantic specimen brought back by 21st-century heirs to the collectors, entomologists and zoologists who created that great institution. Visitors are given timed entry tickets to the Cocoon, take an elevator to its top, and then follow a descending ramp inside that spirals around its research-oriented heart; along the way, they are presumably transformed into nascent scientists or budding devotees. You are meant to emerge from this Cocoon in more ways than one.

But Alfred Waterhouse’s original 1881 Romanesque cathedral of a museum — which rivals its collections as an attraction with its vaulted entrance hall, ornamented pillars, ornate towers, elaborate murals and terra-cotta evocations of the animal kingdom — can almost seem dwarfed by this newly built chrysalis, particularly if you imagine the wing span of the creature that would emerge if the Cocoon were made of silk rather than plaster-coated sprayed concrete.

This might be a sign of the sly wit of the Danish firm C. F. Moller Architects, which designed this part of the museum’s Darwin Center. It opened last fall to much acclaim and seems to straddle two worlds: the new building’s apparent concern with geometric abstraction, light and shape also can give rise to King Kongish fantasies.

But spend some time in this £78 million (roughly $120 million) annex, and the wit becomes subtler, for the Cocoon, the center’s prime exhibition area, is the most important transformation of the Natural History Museum in more than a century. It even seems to define a new approach to science museums. For all the Cocoon’s shortcomings, its effect is palpable, changing your perspective on its classic and venerable ancestor.

The Darwin Center was a two-phase expansion project for the museum; in the first part (which opened in 2002), a new home was found for its zoologists and extraordinary “spirit collection,” some 22 million specimens stored in hundreds of thousands of glass jars filled with preservative “spirits.” Visitors can’t wander along some 13 miles of shelves, but free tours are available, and you can’t get a full sense of the museum’s collection without one. You might glimpse, perhaps, a “parota signata” — a fish bottled by Charles Darwin during his journey on the Beagle — or look inside the museum’s Dermestarium, where flesh-eating beetles clean specimens down to the bones.

The center’s second phase, which made its debut last September, is basically the Cocoon, which aside from its exhibition houses 2 miles of cabinets containing 3 million botanical and 17 million entomological specimens; the 200-some scientists that study them work in more than 11,000 square feet of new laboratory space. The Cocoon is also designed to protect the collections with controlled humidity and temperature, scrupulously preventing infestations of creatures that might prefer devouring pinned specimens to becoming them.

The Cocoon will have a greater impact on the museum than the center’s first phase because it is also designed to draw visitors into a different kind of encounter. It is an inversion of the old institution. In place of ornamentation there is geometric form; instead of Victorian-era skylights and dark rooms there is a bright atrium; instead of displays of objects there are accounts of ideas and procedures; and instead of presenting a fixed order of things it offers one under constant flux and revision.

The research facilities and scientists are part of the exhibition; they are glimpsed through windows, framed by explanations. They even become the subject of the show. The Cocoon’s displays are not really about botany and bugs; they are about the collection and study of botany and bugs.

The exhibition is really about the museum itself — its methods and materials, its passions and enterprise. I don’t know of another science museum that does this. Along the way, of course, you learn about the natural world, but the real focus is on how that world is studied, and how the museum pursues that goal.

“Everyone can play a valuable part in science,” one of the wall displays points out — something that the very existence of the museum proves, since it grew out of amateurs’ collections (and in its early years was bumblingly overseen by amateurs as well). And through the preservation, naming and study of the museum’s 20 million objects, we read, they have become part of “an international network of knowledge.” More than 100,000 beetle specimens, one video tells us, are lent every year to other institutions for research and display.

The Darwin Center is part of the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London; +44-(0)20-7942-5000.