Beyond dioramas - nature's new story in museums
August 8, 2013
Los Angeles -- - The traditional natural history museum is powerful and familiar, but it is also strange. It is weighty, ponderous, pieced together from relics of lost worlds. It evolved in the 19th century, displaying the geological cataclysms that molded the Earth's surface, the creatures that clambered into habitats and the indigenous cultures that were once considered closer to nature. No other museum genre has changed so glacially.
But the pace of evolution has been quickening. Last month, just in time for its centennial this fall, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County completed a $135 million multiyear refashioning: a transformation that has doubled its program space and added new exhibitions and reworked others, including a mammals hall in 2010 and a compelling dinosaur hall in 2011.
Its new entrance is a six-story-high glass pavilion designed by CO Architects in which a hanging skeleton of a 63-foot-long fin whale is silhouetted by 33,000 LED lights. Outside, a 3.5-acre "urban wilderness" designed by Mia Lehrer & Architects has replaced concrete parking lots. Some 31,000 plantings and a 27,000-gallon pond lure dragonflies and hummingbirds, while a curving stone wall harbors smaller samplings of urban wildlife.
Indoors, other examples of the region's creatures - including tarantulas, harvester ants and rats - appear as part of a new interactive Nature Lab that readily attracts parents along with their charges. And in what may be the greatest departure from archetype, "Becoming L.A.," a permanent 14,000-square-foot exhibition - the largest in the museum - surveys the history of Los Angeles.
But what kind of evolution is this, and what does it portend? Unlike the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, the Los Angeles museum has not embraced the style of the contemporary "science center." Under the guidance of the institution's president, Jane G. Pisano, its natural history heritage is preserved as well as transformed.
A T. rex and a Tourist
The stunning dioramas that were mounted in the 1920s and '30s remain graciously intact. So do the museum's greatest fossils. The original 1913 Beaux-Arts rotunda still makes its antique promise of nobility and grandeur. What natural history museum, though, would display, as we find here, one of the first crucifixes to make its way to California in the 18th century? Or the carefully scuffed shoes and torn clothes of Charlie Chaplin's tramp from "City Lights"? And while we would expect to see the skeletal remnants of a baby Tyrannosaurus, why the chassis of an equally extinct Tourist, a 1902 wooden car that was the best-selling automobile in California before World War I?
Including those items is part of the museum's effort at redefinition, although the curators were drawing on an eccentric set of collections that were never really part of the natural history tradition.
To read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment