WilkinsonEyre’s long association with the UK’S Science Museum began with the Challenge of Materials Gallery in 1997, dedicated to the diversity of materials and their uses.
The centrepiece of the gallery was the dramatic Challenge of Materials Bridge spanning the atrium. The glass and steel bridge was suspended from a mesh of fine wires and the translucent bridge deck responded to loads placed upon it with a sound composition.
Following this, we designed the Making of a Modern World gallery which opened in July 2000 and houses the Sciences Museum’s most important and iconic artefacts in a prominent position on the ground floor.
Following these commissions, WilkinsonEyre has been retained for a series of interventions around the Museum’s South Kensington site and has also undertaken the role of masterplanner for the complex.
The Wellcome Wing represents a new venture for the Museum in cutting edge interactive exhibition design. Designed to be an essentially low light environment, a blue glass wall on the west elevation combining with blue-lit side walls combine to create an immersive, intensely coloured space
The Medicine Galleries (2019) is an ambitious cultural project, designed in close collaboration with the museum’s curatorial team, which has transformed the first floor of the Science Museum to create the largest space dedicated to medical artefacts in the world. The new galleries contain more than 3,000 objects selected from the globally significant medical collections of the Science Museum Group and the Wellcome Trust. WilkinsonEyre’s design takes the visitor on a journey through five distinct exhibition themes: Medicine & Bodies, Exploring Medicine, Medicine & Communities, Medicine & Treatments and Faith, Hope and Fear. This is conceived as a progression from darkness into light and back to darkness, symbolising the human life cycle, and concludes with different spiritual responses to illness and mortality
