Cleveland Museum of Natural History designers aim to banish darkness from a once-dowdy institution with brigh – cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio Geese come in gaggles, deer in herds, fish in schools or shoals.

So whats the correct collective noun for butterflies?

A new display in the revamped exhibit wing at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, scheduled for completion in December 2024, seems destined to raise that question.

The display will sandwich dozens of translucent, high-resolution photos of butterflies and moths between 10-foot-high sheets of glass standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling window framing views of the museums Thelma and Kent H. Smith Environmental Courtyard, which was overhauled at the end of 2020.

A new rendering of the exhibit shows how sunlight will flood through the window, creating a luminous experience blending natural beauty and the exacting science of species classification. Beyond that, though, there will be that pesky question about how to refer correctly to butterflies, plural.

And the answer, according to the website animalsandenglish.com, is that groups of butterflies may be referred to as a flight, a flutter, a kaleidoscope, a rabble, a shimmer, a swarm, and a wing.

All of this is a slantwise way of introducing the notion that the latest designs for revamped exhibits at the museum, released to cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, show that the project is intended to evoke wonder and delight in multiple ways.

Chiefly, the new exhibit areas are designed to show off selections from a collection of 5 million specimens in spaces that are flooded with light and connected to the natural world outside. The goal is to keep visitors curious, comfortable, engaged, and eager to spend time.

The dynamic is not going to be what a lot of people remember of old natural history museums as dark, dusty places, said Patrick Gallagher, president and founder of Gallagher & Associates, a design firm with offices in three U.S. cities and Singapore. This is going to be a bright, living environment.

In an update, museum staff and members of the design team provided a new snapshot of the institutions evolving, 17-year, $150 million project to renovate and expand its complex on the west side of Wade Oval in University Circle.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History's expansion and renovation includes the already completed Ralph Perkins II Wildlife Center & Woods Garden Presented by KeyBank.Courtesy Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Conceived in 2007, the multi-part project has included the construction of a 300-space garage, the new Ralph Perkins II Wildlife Center & Woods Garden, completed in 2016, and the completion in late 2020 of Gateway projects worth $8.9 million that included a re-do of the Smith Courtyard, and a renovation of Murch Auditorium.

The overall project is intended to modernize an institution that expanded 10 times since it moved to the west side of Wade Oval in University Circle in 1958.

A series of architecturally nondescript additions over the years led the museum to become a dark, inwardly-focused place with exhibits that looked more and more like musty throwbacks.

The renovated Thelma and Kent H. Smith Environmental Courtyard at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History centers on a meandering path and a paved area with a relief map of Northeast Ohio watersheds.Courtesy Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Sonia Winner, the museums president and CEO, said it has raised $108 million for the project, up from $89 million a year ago.

In June, the museum broke ground for the biggest single component of the expansion and renovation, a $47.8 million phase that includes a new exhibit wing north of the institutions main entrance, and the renovation of older exhibit areas to the south.

Both will be joined by a new central Visitors Hall connecting the main entrance off Wade Oval to the parking garage on the north side of the museum complex.

Designed by DLR Group | Cleveland, the new wing will occupy the old site of the Perkins Wildlife Center, just north of the Shafran Planetarium & Ralph Mueller Observatory, a shiny cone of copper-colored metal.

The DLR design, destined to open up the museums presence on Wade Oval, is intended to evoke the natural history of Northeast Ohio through visual references to the glacier that covered the region until the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago.

A rendering by DLR Group Cleveland depicts new landscaping around the future expansion and renovation of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.Cleveland Museum of Natural History

The new exhibit wing, plus a new lobby and caf and the central Visitors Hall will be covered by a curving, snow-white roof made of cast concrete panels with flowing shapes like those of a glacier.

Large areas of glass will admit sunlight directly into exhibit areas. Landscapes around the building will be designed to resemble those of a glacial moraine, where vegetation takes root on contours smoothed by receding ice.

Inside, the new wing will house exhibits related to the origins of the universe, the history of Earth and the emergence of life.

Visitors will find exhibits recounting the emergence of elements in the periodic table through the heat and compression of supernova starbursts. Theyll be able to use specially designed scopes that will narrative views the outside world. And theyll walk past dinosaur skeletons will appear to jog in front of the big wings big windows..

Two lab areas within the new wing will enable the museums staff scientists to engage the public in scheduled programs about ongoing museum research.

A third new space, the Ames Family Curiosity Center, will be located at the entry to the new wing, just off the new central Visitors Hall.

The Ames Family Center at the natural history museum will center on an interactive display.Cleveland Museum of Natural History / Gallagher & Associates

Inside, a staff scientist will be on call to answer questions about scientific phenomena in the news, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, or climate change. Visitors may also bring in specimens to discuss or examine.

The Ames Center will center on an interactive display resembling a circular tabletop, which will be connected to video displays projected on a circular display overhead.

South of the Visitors Hall, existing exhibit areas will be revamped to focus on Biological Processes such as evolution, the diversity of life, mankinds impact on the natural world, and Northeast Ohio flora and fauna.

The biological exhibits will fit within older portions of the museums footprint that cant be opened up to daylight like the new exhibit wing to the north. That makes them ideal for light-sensitive specimens, such as taxidermy displays, and for immersive environments with projected imagery.

Exhibit areas devoted to "Biological Processes" at the natural history museum will include video displays and light-sensitive specimens.Cleveland Museum of Natural History / Gallagher & Associates

Exhibits in the biological area will include a panoramic display of taxidermy specimens from the arctic to the equator, backed by projected images of landscapes instead of traditional painted dioramas.

Also on view will be an animated video of the ferocious Dunkleosteus terrelli, a terrifying shark-like creature, recently named the Fossil Fish of Ohio.

Senior exhibit designer Jenny Lilligren, a member of the Gallagher team, said that she and her colleagues took inspiration from the glacial motifs and flowing shapes in the DLR design.

Among other things, the designers looked at the famous glacial grooves carved into a limestone outcrop on Kelleys Island, and the ways in which meltwater ripples over layers of eroded shale in Northeast Ohios many creeks.

Accordingly, the designers envisioned the new exhibit areas with pathways flowing around crystalline display cases acting like boulders in a stream.

The new display cases will be designed to enable specimens to be viewed from all angles, and to make them appear to float on nearly invisible mounts, or supporting armatures.

One of the interiors proposed for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History expansion and renovation.Cleveland Museum of Natural History / Gallagher & Associates

White ceilings and walls will reflect abundant daylight in the new wing, where displays of rocks and fossilized dinosaur bones can be exposed to full daylight without harm.

Accent colors and large-scale graphics and throughout the museum will be set within shapes that have smoothed, rounded edges, as if they were carved by a glacier or flowing water.

Overhead, a system of hanging battens, or strips of wood, will be organized in wave patterns designed to reinforce the main pathways through exhibits, while subtly referring to the idea of rippling streams.

Lilligren said the design team chose the fonts, or typefaces used for signs and text panels, with special care.

Large-scale thematic titles for exhibits, placed high up on walls, will use Museo, a font with gently rounded serifs, or flourishes at the ends of letters, a style that Lilligren called friendly and approachable.

A display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History will scan taxidermy specimens arrayed against a digital backdrop rather than a traditional diorama.Cleveland Museum of Natural History / Gallagher & Associates

The smaller body type used for explanatory labels and texts will use Din, a typeface without serifs that is typically used for traffic signs and technical manuals. Lilligren said the font is intended to look straightforward, honest, and trustworthy important considerations for a museum devoted to science.

At every level, the exhibit designs are intended to shape the museum experience, without drawing attention overtly, Lilligren said.

Its not something you have to think about because weve thought about it for you, she said.

Ease of orientation is also key to the museums new architecture and exhibit designs.

Instead of the current circuitous layout, the museum will be organized around its big new Visitor Hall, which will run like a river or a glacial stream through the center of the museum as a place of arrival and departure.

Here, the designers intend to install a few powerful exhibits to stoke curiosity and provide iconic touchpoints.

Theyll include old favorites, such as the 70-foot-long reconstructed fossilized skeleton of the museums Haplocanthosaurus delfsi, known as Happy.

The reconstructed fossilized skeleton of "Happy,'' a massive dinosaur, will be featured in the new Visitor Hall at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.Cleveland Museum of Natural History / Gallagher & Associates

And theyll include the museums newly conceived display of butterflies, a series of delicate, miniature splashes of life and color.

The Visitor Hall, Lilligren said, really is a space where we want people to come in and be wowed, and say, ' I want to see more. "

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Cleveland Museum of Natural History designers aim to banish darkness from a once-dowdy institution with brigh - cleveland.com