Restoration of the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils

Project Details

Project Description

FROM THE ARCHITECTS:

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C., will re-open the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils - Deep Time after a five-year renovation on June 8^th, 2019. The hall, home to the museum's collection of dinosaur fossils and latest exhibit, Deep Time, has been restored to its former 1910, Beaux Arts Gallery design. EwingCole, an award-winning architecture, engineering, and interior design firm based in Philadelphia, designed and oversaw the execution of the project

"For the museum's roughly eight million annual visitors, the splendor of the hall is as much a part of the experience as the specimens they contain," said EwingCole Director of Cultural Practice, Jeffrey Hirsch.

Major renovations in the 1960s, 80s, and early 2000s, dramatically altered the appearance and unique character of Dinosaur Hall. Museum administrators sought to bring it back in a meaningful and responsible way.

"There was a desire across the Smithsonian to look at the architectural integrity of their buildings and determine how they could best strengthen them and bring them back," said Hirsch. "One major goal for the project was to convey a respect for our architectural heritage by returning the hall's aesthetics to their original state."

Prior alterations concealed a skylight above the hall, obstructing natural light and altering the feel of the gallery. EwingCole's renovation uncovered the skylight and surrounding exterior windows, restored decorative plasterwork, and upgraded the museum's aging infrastructure with modern technologies. Each of the museum's main halls are now open and inviting.

EwingCole's Director of Lighting Design, Angela Matchica, noted the importance of bringing daylight back into the space adding, "unmitigated sunlight created problems for the museum and its specimens in the past, so re-exposing Dinosaur Hall's skylights came with a set of challenges."

EwingCole designers turned to a glazing system containing an aerogel nanotechnology that serves as both an insulator and light filter. This material mitigates both ultraviolet light and heat as it illuminates the gallery. Controlled daylight now floods the hall for the first time in nearly two decades, the 65 million-year-old specimens below remain protected, and interior temperatures are more easily regulated.

"The space is overwhelming; the size of the objects is overwhelming," said Matchica. "You never got that sense of scale before, but now visitors will see the full gravitas of the dinosaurs. It's breathtaking."

Another key focus of the project aimed at restoring the hall's ornate plasterwork which had been lost for generations. The design team sought to recreate these details using original methods. "The craft involved in recreating this work is a dying art, with a dwindling number of people who still do this type of work," said architect Ryan Delahoussaye.

The templates for the new moldings were cast from original building fabric in Ocean's Hall, a sister gallery located in the museum. "Luckily, we were able to bring ATS Studios in, who were able to right a wrong that had been done to the space so many years ago," Delahoussaye said. "It's been restored in an authentic way."

Additional improvements include an all new FossiLab, a fully functioning interactive research space within the gallery that gives visitors a behind the scenes view of paleontological research. The lab's glass enclosure brings visitors directly into the scientist's work stations, allowing them to watch experts clean and study new and current specimens. FossiLab is designed so that research volunteers can more easily interact with curious guests, a key goal for the Smithsonian.

"As technology improves, we learn more about the specimens -- even the ones currently in our collection," said Delahoussaye. "From the original concept, there was a strong interest in letting the researchers engage with the public and having them understand that this work is ongoing."

Also reopening on June 8 is the renovated West Court Atrium, home to an improved cafeteria and new restaurant. The first-floor restaurant provides a perfect viewing area for the newly installed megalodon, a prehistoric, 50-foot shark. The space is warm, inviting, and organized for the museum's millions of annual visitors. A key element of the design is a large custom wall graphic, an enlarged illustration by Ernst Haeckel, which provided an inspiration for the color pallete of various materials such as woods, metals, natural stone, and polished concrete. The ceiling is open and blacked out with a series of eclectic light fixtures placed sporadically through the space providing visual interest and a warm glow.

"Prior to the renovations, you always felt like you were in an artificial setting, but so much of the museum's story is about Earth's broader ecosystem," said Hirsch. "The spaces have remarkably changed. They feel more expansive and alive."


The exhibit in the newly restored David H. Koch Hall of Fossils is called "Deep Time," and was designed by Reich+Petch Design

FROM THE EXHIBIT DESIGNERS:

Creating a new gallery for Dinosaurs and Fossils at the Smithsonian Institution is an opportunity that comes once every few generations. The historic hall, originally from 1911, has been entirely renovated. The exhibition, Deep Time, highlights 4.6 billion years of global change on Earth.

Reich+Petch Design won the honor to design Deep Time through international competition. Having created many other award-winning natural history exhibitions, the firm sought to advance a new perspective on how to engage visitors in relevant ways. The content is expansive and ambitious; with an integrated perspective, the exhibit brings together collections and insights from many departments of the museum. The narrative teaches a contemporary audience to better understand the history of life on Earth using large charismatic fossil specimens, immersive environments, sculpture, miniature environmental dioramas, video and a circulation path that “walks through” time. The exhibit helps visitors to understand global change over time, learn from the past, and recognize how humans are changing the future.

Unlike virtually every fossil, dinosaur or paleontological exhibit, The Hall of Fossils illustrates the continuity between human impact and earlier geological eras, including content on how humans are affecting life right now and the Earth’s future. A major challenge of the project was working with the museum to try to translate and illustrate 4.6 billion years of biological history in a single 31,000 sf exhibit.

Throughout the interpretive spaces, the continuous flow of life and time is one of the most important concepts of the hall which is reinforced by colorful ribbons with key messages that move from platform to platform. At specific places, the flow of exhibits is disrupted by dramatic, sculptural Extinction walls. The design expresses a key message: Life flows powerfully forward; dramatic extinctions disrupt, life re-sets– but is never the same. A wide range of media and creative tools deliver exhibits that respond to the diversity of how people learn: through touch, through visual cues, through intellectual engagement, through interactive media multimedia and onwards.

Along the circulation path 10 areas illustrate different geologic eras (Quaternary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, etc) highlighting the fossil skeletons, plants and other organisms that lived in each era. In explaining this abundance of ancient life, models, murals, bronze casts and sculptures, interactive media, images, text and videos enable visitors to understand life in the ancient past. With 6 million visitors per year, opportunities for visitor interaction had to be abundant and robust. Along with innovative digital media, traditional bronze sculptures proved to be a perfect medium. Touchable sculptures abound throughout including a giant 3’ long, giant crawling millipede; a 63 million year old fox-like mammal; dinosaur vertebrae; and casts of teeth and tail spikes.

Reich+Petch was responsible for art direction and creative direction in the hall yet the design expression celebrates the work of literally hundreds of artists, sculptors, filmmakers, writers, modelmakers, lighting designers, muralists, fabricators engineers, architects, acoustic consultants and many others. This team, along with the Smithsonian’s curators and scientists, uses its artistry to integrate complex and dense ideas as they fill a public space. Five galleries, seven disciplines, 100 major specimens, 600+ smaller specimens, and the integration of multimedia and complex graphic needs within the exhibit, along with vital peer review of script content and visitor evaluation, insured accuracy and scientific rigor. The content informs the design to such a great extent that it’s hard to separate the two.

The task was to communicate, to the widest possible audience, how, over the course of billions of years, the lineages of thousands of species evolved, stopping and re-starting as enormous upheavals shook the planet.

In its messaging goals, layers of information, visual density, tour de force presentation of fossils in animated poses and sheer scope of artistry, Reich+Petch led the design of one of the most ambitious exhibitions in the history of the Smithsonian, an institution that continues to be a world leader in understanding - and communicating -global change over time.