Imagine a national museum where the experience starts before entering the building, with exhibits brought to life, feeling as if they are hands on instead of hands off, and where even queueing can be entertaining. The Natural History Museum’s Urban Nature Project does this and much more, transforming two hectares of external space at the front and side of its historic building from 1860. The architects Feilden Fowles have replaced the old geometrically arranged linear paths and sterile lawns, with an immersive version of a natural history exhibition: a new kind of public urban garden. Visitors now approach the vast museum building through an Evolution Garden, and can meander in biologically diverse areas of grassland, woodland or wetland, the latter with a large wildlife pond. The gardens have been consolidated as places of conservation and research. Feilden Fowles, have reimagined the Natural History Museum in the garden, engaging visitors by bringing parts of the collections to life outside, in their natural environments. It does this assembling material from the Museum’s original bifurcated collections of animal species and the natural history of the British Isles, with its current approach to preserving and recording the natural world1. On the east side, in the Evolution Garden, the grounds have become living galleries, where rocks, fossils, plants and creatures cohabit in the closest possible evocations of their past and extinct worlds. On the west side, visitors experience in the Nature Discovery Garden current and future environments presented to advance public awareness of climate affects on urban nature.
Rocky gorges instead of flights of stairs
The overall concept has resulted in a sinuous landscape of layered information and experiences, where high visitor numbers are more fluently distributed2. The two main sloping routes are so elegantly integrated that you hardly notice how deftly the new design resolves the garden’s major access problem, which previously meant negotiating steep flights of stairs, either down from the Cromwell Road, or up from the Underground route. Now, emerging from South Kensington station’s subway tunnel, the journey starts seamlessly from precambrian times, in a dramatically upward ramping ravine, its steep retaining walls faced with angled strata of twenty six different rocks, all but two collected from across the UK. The collection of stones starts with grey Lewisian Gneiss from the outer Hebrides, the oldest at nearly three billion years. Cambrian Quartzite and Grampian Granite follow as time travels to the Silurian era and Sarsen Stone, the youngest at a mere twenty five million years. Feilden Fowles have drawn inspiration in their detailed design, from the NHM’s contents, classifications and its scientific purposes. Their realisation has emerged working in collaboration with the museum’s scientists, and the landscape architects J&L Gibbons. The stones and their angled configuration reference William Smith’s 1815 geological cross section found in the NHM’s archive. The stones’ display brings Smith’s first geological mapping of the British Isles to life. Assembled together, their multiple colours, and texture differentiations, convey the UK’s rich geological range and history. Brass insets in the path inform visitors that they are travelling five million years per metre. The stones re-emerge as rock pieces in the prehistoric gardens. Each stone comes with a story. One of the youngest, Puddingstone, embedded with flint pebbles, was rescued from a road construction by a farmer in Hertfordshire. The material of the benches in the east half are also integral to the geological journey. They are made from equivalents to the ancient stones, such as granites, or Portland stone, echoing London’s pavements
A dinosaur welcomes you
Descending a gradual ramp from the Cromwell Road, between the NHM’s mature Plane trees, the visitor experiences an unexpected prehistoric landscape of rugged rocks and ancient plants, tree ferns, mosses, liverworts, equisetum (horsetails), and Wollemi pine trees, the latter believed to have been extinct until rediscovered in Australia. The Evolution Garden is an immersive prequel to the NHM. Discovery starts long before the museum’s front door: living plants assembled with exhibits and representations, contextualise the museum’s content. Feilden Fowles have included the new garden’s robust recycled path in the experience. A brass outline of a 2.5 metre long 50 kg extinct arthropleura, a millipede from the carboniferous era is set in the surface. The garden’s largest inhabitant follows: a twenty five metre long, life size bronze diplodocus dinosaur. In an invisible pre-tensioned engineering feat, it stands spectacularly unsupported in a setting more akin to its natural environment than the original plaster cast version inside the museum. The journey continues with a mix of the reconstructed and real, with castings of smaller extinct creatures set on rocks, and fossils from the NHM’s collection set into the path, along with brass outlines of lifesize extinct or still living mammalian footprints.
Gardens refer to the old building
In the garden’s overall configuration, with the past to the east, and the present and future to the west, Feilden Fowles have referenced how the Museum’s architect Alfred Waterhouse chose ‘to incorporate living and extinct animals into the architectural details of the building, with extinct species in the east wing and living ones in the west.’3 Detailed elements and devices, simultaneously serious and playful, connect the garden displays to the NHM’s contents and its building’s facades. An angled opening cut through a large standing stone block, connects a terracotta detail of ammonites on column capitals to a fossil in the Evolution Garden. Metal viewing and listening funnels collect species’ via their sounds, and encourage visitors to be aware of what lives in the Nature Discovery Garden. Both Gardens have spaces for quieter study, contemplation and escape. On the east, alternative routes to the main path offer quieter discovery amongst the fauna and geological specimens. The Nature Discovery Garden has hidden areas with Douglas Fir chaise longues for contemplation of the tree canopy. The Wildlife Garden to the west, has been developed to take advantage of what already exists. Since its 1995 inception, used as a ‘living laboratory’ to study the effects of climate change, the Museum’s two hundred scientists have recorded more than 3,500 living species of animal, plant and fungus.4 As a major component, the pond has been enlarged by sixty percent, biologically diverse, and designed to be more accessible, from a viewing platform above, and a path which enable everyone to look into and across the water. Where the path passes between the pond areas, it widens into an outdoor classroom with a large oak storage table, on which children can examine the specimens they have collected from the water, checking them against inset representations around the table’s edges.
Pavilions are ecologically designed
The Urban Nature Project includes two small load bearing stone and Douglas Fir buildings: the Garden Kitchen, a multi purpose café and events space in the Evolution Garden in the east, and a Nature Activity Centre in the Discovery Garden in the west, with a classroom in direct relationship to its outdoor learning environment. Encompassing the NHM’s holistically sustainable vision for the project and its maintenance, the buildings continue Feilden Fowles’ ethos and practice of lower embodied carbon design through ‘Lean building’ methods5, demonstrated in their own studio and the Waterloo City Farm site barn. Both also use passive design principles. The Garden Kitchen pavilion stands forward of the Paleontology building, a 1976 precast concrete framed, curtain walled extension to Waterhouse’s museum. Feilden Fowles’ single storey stone and concrete, post and beam form, with a grid based on Paleontology’s emphatic rhythm, infills the latter’s dark, partially empty base, with back of house and service uses. It anchors the pavilion, and ties the Museum’s buildings together in an ensemble. This is completed by the infilling of the open ground floor of Paleontology’s octagonal tower to make a function room. The café’s solid loadbearing masonry frame is composed of three limestones, directly related to the stone strata of the Evolution Timeline. Whilst accentuating the buildings’ loadbearing stone structures, they also respond to the horizontally striped colours of Waterhouse’s Romanesque terracotta elevations. The plinth, formed into a seat, is grey Purbeck Spangle. The columns are formed from Clipsham and Ancaster limestones, with wet cast stone lintels above. The principal is similar in both buildings: in the free standing Nature Activity Centre the walls use the same limestones, but with a timber beam, part of the lightweight timber roof, as the lintel. In each building, the corner column turned at 45 °, makes its loadbearing nature explicit.
How should a public garden be designed?
The Nature Activity Centre’s robust pitched timber frame, houses a classroom, staffroom, office and small laboratory, all with garden views, under the simple oversailing roof. The latter’s timber shingle clad construction elegantly discharges into stone rills on both long sides, a declaration of the holistic water conservation strategy: All the rainwater is collected and reused in the gardens. A workshop and toolstore are housed in a diminutive sister building. The gardens and buildings have been detailed by Feilden Fowles as part of the project’s ethos of sustainable environments, while simultaneously drawing on the NHM with explicit fascination and delight.
The NHM’s grounds form the largest local public garden within a one kilometre area of the museum, in a neighbourhood dominated by private access gated gardens. Their redesign has overturned conventional views of museum display and London’s typical high maintenance public gardens. Unexpected views, juxtapose a lost landscape with London’s red double decker buses, and Kensington’s stucco buildings. In its presentation of the present and future, the Urban Nature Project shows the potential for diverse urban landscapes, setting an example for London’s outdoor spaces. – Ros Diamond
1 The first director Richard Owen conceived the Natural History Museum as a ‘cathedral to nature’. It was to contain two collections: one would ‘constitute an epitome of natural history’ with the ‘characters of the Provinces, Classes and Orders and Genera of the Animal Kingdom’, ie the Index Museum, the other was to illustrate the Natural History of the British Isles’ Mark Girouard, Alfred Waterhouse and the Natural History Museum, 1999
2 As the UK’s second largest museum attraction, the NHM has 5.5 million visitors per year
3 ‘The decoration of the building facades with plants and animals from the collection was at the behest of Richard Owen, the first director of the NHM’ ibid Quote 1
4 When JL Gibbons asked for a list of species on site, they were given a 33,000 page Excel spreadsheet
5 Feilden Fowles have described ‘lean building’ as designing with a material and structural economy appropriate to an era of threatened resources