The second phase of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre by Danish architect CF Møller contains an eight-storey, sprayed concrete ‘cocoon’ surrounded by a glass atrium. In addition to some public circulation and reception areas, Sutton Vane Associates lit the Attenborough Studio audio-visual theatre, the exhibition areas on the top three floors and the stunning, interactive Climate Change Wall.

Sutton Vane’s scheme enhances the lighting provided as part of the base build, to improve the visitor’s experience of the building. An 85 metre line of LEDs wash up the curved base of the cocoon, helping to humanise its scale during the day and adding ‘magic’ at night when the museum hosts events.
Inside the cocoon light for the visitor route, is created by a specially-engineered kick- and childproof steel casing at floor level designed to angle the light down and across the ramp.

This avoids glare or distracting from the exhibits. Sutton Vane took the decision not to mount any lighting fixtures on the inside of the cocoon walls, to avoid visual clutter or getting in the way of projected images.

Some 2,500 self-guided visitors a day follow a route through the cocoon overlooking the science and collection areas. Along the route there are niches that contain exhibits and AV displays. Exhibits in some cases are backlit with fibre optics driven by energy-efficient, infrared-coated tungsten halogen, and operated by the visitors. Some niches are seating areas with computer or TV screens and these are lit with LEDs.
The Attenborough Studio and the Climate Change Wall are on the ground floor.

The 64-seat Attenborough Studio has four layers of lighting to suit uses that range from talks to film shows. The house lighting reuses the fluorescent installed as part of the base build. Sutton Vane Associates added fully dimmable, low voltage IRC tungsten halogen and an LED-based system designed to produce dramatic colour-changing effects. Sutton Vane Associates also specified a full theatrical lighting rig. Finally, elegant LED lighting is used for way-finding and safety lighting.

The 12 metre-wide Climate Change Wall shows hundreds of stills, images and videos. The colours change as visitors approach, and as the images change to illustrate human impact on the environment. Visitors can also activate its touch panel displays.

The technical challenge here lay in creating the right interface and the right banks of LEDs that light the wall, while the aesthetic choice included making the edges of the areas of light blur slightly to give the whole display visual integrity. Sutton Vane Associates has therefore created a series of unobtrusive but clever schemes that subtly enhance different aspects of the visitor experience.

Shortlisted 2009 FX  Awards