Enjoy the Bugs,
but Don’t Feed
the Scientists
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.
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.
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.
“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 study.
In an introductory room, touch screens show individual specimens, and we learn how to think of them as related to others, recognizing similarities and differences before broader questions are raised. That is how the exhibition proceeds, beginning with classification. “There are 3.5 million butterflies in our collections,” the text says, “representing 95 percent of the 20,000 species known in the world.” And you can see them mounted in scrupulous order in drawers. But how, the show asks, do we sort and classify? How do we make sense of variation within a species? What resemblances matter and why?
What happens too when we are able to examine organisms on a microscopic level? Museum scientists, we are told, after studying the DNA of termites, decided they were more closely related to cockroaches than previously thought and so reclassified the termite order Isoptera. Such seemingly arcane insights, we learn, can have larger consequences; similar feats might discern how ferns evolved or how to fight diseases like malaria.
Technology is heavily used here, generally to good effect, in videos that project against curved walls, on touch screens that allow you to page through virtual specimens, in guided investigations in which you are challenged to find the essential aspects of an organism and discern its familial relations. The museum has also set up an extensive series of Web pages (nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/) that give a flavor for the exhibition’s tone and character.
But at times technology can become a trap: each visitor is also given a bar-coded card to swipe at various screens to request more information on the Web after leaving the museum, a gimmick that’s superfluous and awkwardly executed.
The Cocoon’s strength is that it humanizes scientific research, stressing that it is an inquiry conducted by curious individuals who undertake strenuous labors before reaching insight. In one display case we see the kinds of items scientists have taken on expeditions as they conduct field work in the jungles of Borneo or other forbidding climes, including a battered copy of “War and Peace,” a deck of cards, a Mars bar and athlete’s foot powder, supplements to the tools of the trade we already have seen (like a machete for clearing undergrowth). We also learn how specimens are preserved and displayed, and how they become the object of international cooperation.
Several museum curators also appear in videos, on walls and on touch screens, passionately advocating for their specialties. “When I was young,” we read next to a large image of the curator Jan Beccaloni, “I used to watch spiders for hours. I’ve never lost that curiosity.” For our delectation, she holds a tray of extremely furry, somewhat creepy arachnids.
There are moments, though, when the exhibition goes too far in its promotional preoccupations, almost becoming creepy itself. We watch researchers at work through windows, as if they too were specimens in a giant hive. “Scientists at work,” warn the posted signs, as men and women in white coats talk, write or peer into microscopes. “Please do not use flash photography.”
But the Cocoon’s biggest weakness is that it deliberately pitches itself low rather than high, perhaps because the museum is among Britain’s Top 5 tourist attractions. Nothing is taken for granted; arguments are made on the most basic level: botany is interesting, entomology is fascinating, research is important, collections are revealing, natural history museums are scientific institutions. The Cocoon is saved from obviousness by the cleverness of its displays, and because, in some, it is possible to probe more deeply. It may be that over time the museum can aim higher, since the displays seem flexibly designed.
This intellectual softness made the chrysalis metaphor itself seem overdone; the pains of rebirth are sacrificed for ease and popularity. This is not a new quandary of course. It echoes the kind of debates that went on when the museum evolved in the 1860s as the new building was being planned. The institution’s first brilliant curator, Richard Owen (who invented the name for dinosaurs and taught biology to Queen Victoria’s children), argued that this “cathedral to nature” should be accessible to the broadest public and that it should almost overwhelm visitors with the scale of its collections; the scientist Thomas Huxley felt just the opposite.
But what the Cocoon fully succeeds in doing is teaching us that the collections found in the museum’s older halls are themselves reflections of curiosity, compulsion and analysis, that they were laid out because of arguments being made. Owen, for example, a religious believer opposed to evolutionary theory, believed that extinct and living species should occupy different wings. The Cocoon also shows us that what we see as a static array of specimens is actually a stroboscopic image of knowledge in perpetual motion. And while not a shocking revelation, for the museum that is still a kind of rebirth.
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