They're building this one building but
it's a national museum in the national
capital. There are a lot of things that
come along with it so it's an epic
proposition; it's an epic story; you're
building a museum for another hundred
years.
The main heritage elements that we're
restoring are the things that
essentially make the most important
character of the building. Renovating an
old house, if anyone has done it, will
tell you it's just an absolute nightmare.
Well here multiply that by a thousand.
That's a challenge. There's no question
about it but it's a particularly
exciting time. In the end you've got this
whole environment that comes together.
All the people who work here, they're not
here because of the building, they're
here because of the mission and that's
what will make the building come alive.
The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa
has been in existence for more than a
hundred and fifty years. Since 1912, the
museum has been housed in the Victoria
Memorial Museum building, one of the most
historically important buildings in the
nation. This imposing Edwardian era
building is often referred to as the
castle because of its impressive stone
facade. Over time the museum has become
internationally known for its research
from discovering new species to doing
leading work in biodiversity. But its
exhibits have also delighted and entertained visitors for generations.
 
It's always really nice to come and see all the animals. It
gives him a chance to see really how big
the animals as opposed to seeing them in a book.
My son is only four and a half but we come about two three times
a year, yeah he really enjoys it. He got
one of those little sets where you can
go and chase insects so now at least
someone can teach him more. Visitors
haven't always been able to explore the
Natural Sciences with such exciting
interactive experiences. In the past most
of the museum's collections were hidden
away in vaults. It existed mainly to
collect and preserve specimens for
research and for posterity. Today we are
really a very different kind of
institution. We're very much more of a
dynamic social hub within a community. We
want to bring our collections out and to
be able to use them as examples. Today
the museum has a larger role. The museum
educates us about vital environmental
issues and our relationship to the
natural world around us. The Canadian
Museum of Nature began as a sparkle in
the eye of geologist Sir William Logan.
During his lifetime as director of the
Geological Survey of Canada, his field
parties managed to collect over 2,000
boxes of raw scientific material, ranging
from plants, rocks, fossils, to cultural
artifacts.
He campaigned hard for a science museum
to display these treasures. By the turn
of the century the nation's capital was
growing rapidly. Prime Minister Sir
Wilfred Laurier's grand vision was to make
Ottawa a "Washington of the north" which
would include an impressive National
Museum.
David Ewart, born in Scotland in 1843 was
arguably the most prolific senior
architect of Public Works in Ottawa at
the time. As the chief Dominion architect
he was given the prestigious job of
designing the new National Museum.
Ewart had as his model, our Parliament
buildings but he was also sent on a tour
of Europe to learn what was the latest
in museums
and came back and designed this museum
in a neo-gothic style. And this
particular style is very much inspired
by Windsor Castle Hampton Court in
England. Construction started in 1905 and
took five years to complete. The final
cost was just under a million dollars, an
enormous sum at the time. So it's very
ambitious project for Canada and for
Ewart, it was kind of the biggest building
that he had designed up until that point.
But before the work had even been
finished, fissures began to appear in the
building's heavy stone walls. Some
workers were afraid of entering the
basement
where strange noises were heard. It was
said that broken stone, flew like bullets
from the massive stone foundations.
Despite these problems, the elegant
museum building opened to the public in
1912. There were display cases stocked
with minerals, birds and fossil specimens
in the lower galleries. Scientists worked
on the collections and did research on
the upper two floors. In its first year,
the museum attracted over 15,000
visitors. Early on the museum became
important to the nation for other
reasons. In February 1916, a huge fire
destroyed the parliament buildings. The
government was relocated to the museum
building for the next four years. It was
also where Sir Wilfrid Laurier lay in
state when he died in 1919. The museum
building has had many tenants over the
years.
Besides Sir William Logan's Natural
History specimens, it has been home to
the country's priceless collections of
fine art and cultural artifacts. By 1990,
these other collections had all moved to
their own new museums leaving the
Canadian Museum of Nature to itself. But
by then this Ottawa landmark was showing
its age and behind its beautiful facade
a myriad of flaws and shortcomings lay
hidden. This historical building had to
be rescued from an uncertain future to
fulfill its role as a modern museum. The
building had been challenging as a
museum facility for at least two or
three decades but it is Canada's first
national museum. It was built as a part
of the building of the nation. There was
really no way this building would be
torn down.
A pivotal moment came in 1997 when
astronaut Roberta Bondar presented to
potential sponsors a series of large
format photographs of national parks. The
sponsor walked up to have a closer look
and a piece of sludge fell off the
ceiling right into this fifteen thousand
dollar photograph and and this creation
of Dr. Bondar's. So it just kind of took
my breath away and brought a number of
things into focus about the building,
about the limitations. Within two months
the government had authorized the
funding that we needed in order to
really study what the building would
need. A team of top architects was hired
to create a complete renewal plan for
the museum building. I can tell you we've
got a lot of work ahead of us and I know
you guys are excited as I am to show
what we can do with this historic
building and how we introduce the modern
interventions that will make it really sing.
Studies showed there were many more
serious problems than the original
builders could have imagined. Without
considering where it was built, Ewart had
placed this massive stone structure on a
deep bed of leda clay, a remnant of the
ancient Champlain Sea which once covered
the Ottawa Valley. The engineers designed
a very heavy building and as it was
being built, it was beginning to sink. And
Ewart, it appears was in a certain
amount of denial. As an architect I can
empathize with him, but the building
ended up sinking about half a meter in
the first three, four, five years which is
a lot of sinking and the outcome of that...
there are huge cracks in the building
and our beautiful tower, designed by
Ewart began to pull away from the
building. And within a few years after it
was completed
they had to dismantle it.
That's something that I'm sure Ewart
was very disappointed in.
After barely five years, the tower had to
come down.
Because it's sitting on about thirty meters of clay, 
from the very beginning the museum has had
inadequate foundations. When we opened up
that wall at the foundation level, the
footings were actually broken. This is
one of the first times I've seen
foundations just break and it was
dramatic. Where the elevators are going
up through the building, the walls on
either side had giant cracks that were a
foot wide. That was probably one of the
most interesting, sort of, engineering
challenges was to... how do we support new
construction there when we already know
we have inadequate foundations. The
floor at the ground floor of the museum
had huge deformations exhibited in it
and we had to sort of build a new flat
floor over the existing bent structure
to create a new level surface. Added to
the foundation problems, Ottawa lies
right in the middle of a seismic
activity zone. In layman's terms,
earthquake territory. But the building
was not conceived with any seismic
precautions in mind. This building
originally was built before there was
any requirement to resist earthquakes. We
studied all kinds of options to
reinforce the building but of course
it's a heritage building so in the end
our solution was to add a steel
structure on the inside of the building
that wouldn't be obvious from the
outside but is certainly obvious on the
inside if you know where to look. It
involved 2,000 tons of steel reinforcing
coming into the building bolted to the
exterior walls, new
connections to all the floors and a
substantial effort. It's like a skeleton
that is just inside the skin of the
building and it carries all of the
lateral loads down to foundations. The
work needed to reinforce the building
and bring everything up to modern
standards was estimated to take five
years. Big plans were in the works.
Reinforcing the structure, adding a
unique climate control system, preserving
and restoring all the beautiful heritage
elements, redesigning the interior spaces
to make them more functional and
creating a totally new structure, the
lantern on the front of the building.
This last feature would give improved
access to all floors of the museum. The
cost for all this work just over two
hundred million dollars. And this was
just for the building itself. The museum
would have to find other funds to fill
the rebuilt galleries with new modern
exhibitions. Construction was scheduled
to happen in two stages. First would be
the renewal of the west wing, containing
the fossil, bird and mammal galleries and
the construction of a new south wing.
Stage two would see the rebuilding of
the east wing for the new earth and
water galleries, as well as renovation of
the atrium and construction of the new
lantern structure. The museum was last
renovated in the late 1960s which caused
it to be closed for five years. But this
was not an option the museum wanted to
consider this time. The potential for
losing its visitor base by closing was
too high a cost and so the decision was
taken to keep sections of the museum
open throughout the entire renewal
process. But this was to create special
challenges for both the construction
team and the museum staff.
 
 
 
When we first started the renewal
project, it was a lovely, grand, old
building but it was not a functional
museum. If you look at the pictures of
this museum a hundred years ago
when it first opened, it's a very
spacious and almost an elegant feel to
it but it has none of the kind of
immersive experience that we give
visitors today. We know that people
company are not just to learn stuff but
they come here in part to be entertained
and it's a combination of those two
things that makes the visitor experience
worthwhile. The museum staff had to
prepare the mammal gallery for the move
from the east to the west wing. Exciting
new exhibits and displays were being
planned but there was one element that
staff and visitors alike were unanimous
in wanting to keep for the new mammal
gallery; the dioramas.
Throughout the 1960s, artists Clarence Tillenius and Hugh Monahan created the
backgrounds for a series of
extraordinarily realistic dioramas. Their
work captured not just a moment in
nature but also a museum exhibition
style unique to that era. These dioramas
are to our museum, a national treasure.
In terms of the the scope and the scale
of dioramas in Canada, this is pretty
much the largest collection. They were
created to demonstrate to the public,
environments typically they wouldn't
have access to unless they traveled. What
we're doing is documenting the current
layout of the exhibition and once it's
documented then we can start stripping
away
the components. There are hundreds of
little pieces of information that have
to be accumulated because we have to put
these back together again.
Our initial planning did not require the
movement of any large exhibition
components but as the project developed,
it became clear that we were going to
have to move everything. Moving the
dioramas was a monumental task. A
temporary bridge was built across the
central atrium, linking the east and west
wings, allowing the dioramas to be moved
from one side of the museum to the other.
And in the end, and this is the
heartbreaking part for me, we had to cut
them up in several pieces,
each one of them and put them back
together, piece by every little piece.
Every little piece of grass you see in
the foreground was taken out, cleaned,
sometimes repainted and put back in
piece by piece. Then we had to over paint
them and try and try to hide all the
cuts we made in them. So far
we've been successful. It's the kind of
decision that we had to make in order to
make the project work. With the dioramas as
the centerpiece for the new Mammal
Gallery, the Bird and Fossil Galleries
were also completely renewed.
The new displays are interactive,
interpretive and immersive. All hallmarks
of the modern museum visitors' experience.
While visitors enjoy the newly reopened
west wing, work was going on behind the
scenes in the closed east wing and the
atrium.
It's 15 mms. I believe it's imported from Italy. We are actually
laying the mosaic upside down. This is
the finished side, you can see the paper
on top. Once it's laid we have to go back
and wet the sheets and then make sure
it's soft enough to peel, that you don't
want to be lifting the mosaic. It's
meticulous. It takes a bit of time. It's
very unusual. This is probably for me,
honestly, it would be once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to do some sort of work like
this. It's not something you do every
day and it has to be done right the
first time and there's no two ways about
it.
Once it's completed, the floor, it will be
quite exquisite. It will be a very nice
floor. It's incredibly rewarding to come
into an old building, see the problems and
find all these beautiful, beautiful
materials. Many of them are hidden behind
carpet and finishes and all kinds of
things that people have done over time.
And to go there and lift a piece of
carpet and find the original ceramic
tiles from the turn-of-the-century
looking absolutely splendid. To be able
to find those materials and restore them
and bring back life to the building that
it had at the turn of the century is what I
really, really love.
You can see we have heritage marble. We
have heritage glass. We have heritage stone and we have heritage plaster and the plaster,
which in the end will also be painted so
that in the end, you're doing the
work in the right order and you end up
with a fully finished piece of music or
symphony by the time we're done.
How are the guys finding trying to make
the new cove moldings and things to
match the existing mouldings? A little
difficult. A lot of people don't do this
anymore.
It’s a lost trade. It's hard to find
people that do it. You have a template, I think. We do have a template. I
think you have a template that you made
to match the original. We try to do it with the mould. And what happens if it
doesn't match when you get to the other
side? Then we have a problem.
Well, are you doing a beautiful job.
Among the building's many heritage
elements, are the spectacular themed
stained-glass windows. They had to be
carefully taken out of their frames,
cleaned and restored. Yes, it hasn't seen
the light of day for a lot,
a lot of years. So first things first, it's
heading for the bath.
It's in as-found condition. It's still covered with all the original dust.
You should see him do the dishes. [laughter] [inaudible] It's still going to be in reasonable shape? Beautiful. Nice. Oh yes.
All of the stained-glass windows have a historic natural motif, so
they all have birds and fauna and
animals in their stained-glass motifs.
They are really very, very beautiful
pieces and some of them have actually
been hiding for the last 40-50 years
where you couldn't actually see them and
we discovered them when we opened up
ceiling spaces. Overall the pieces are
in amazing shape and we're very, very
happy to be able to restore them.
Examining, dismantling and restoring the
original architectural elements revealed
startling differences between the way
construction crews work, then and now. A
century ago architect, David Ewart
needed just a few plans to design and
describe the entire building. This modern
renewal has generated thousands of
drawings and reports, detailing every
minute aspect of the building's structure
and its improvements. It's a very unique
project. There's lots of different
elements to this job that you would
never see on most typical jobs. It's more
than just a renovation because the type
of building we're dealing with and
the very extensive work that we're
performing inside this building. It's
been probably the most challenging
project that I've worked on. Probably
nobody will ever say they've worked on a
job like this again. Everybody has a
slightly different interest but yet we
all have to work together towards a goal.
The construction manager wants to build
things quickly and easily. The consultant
wants a certain aesthetic and that
sometimes can be more difficult to
construct. And the client wants a
building that's functional and works for
them. And those three things can be
sometimes diametrically opposed.
Sometimes they go smoothly together but
often we have to sit and hash out what
are we actually going to do to solve a
particular problem so that all three
requirements can be met.
The renovation project would see up to
200 people on site each day with dozens
more behind the scenes, all working
together to make the museum's May 2010
launch. The scheduled hand over to the
museum is fast approaching, giving
exhibition designers and technicians the
enormous job of creating the galleries
in time for the entire Museum's Grand
Reopening. Staff from the earth gallery
are assembling a variety of stones,
crystals and gems from the Museum's vast
collection for their new exhibition.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The museum is also designing a brand new exhibition, the water gallery.
So it's designers have to create this
new exhibition from the ground up. This
gallery will explore water in all its
forms and the incredible variety of life
within it. It's centerpiece will be the
imposing skeleton of an adolescent blue
whale. You know this whale is huge. It's
more than 165 feet long. It dominates the room.
Everything is relative to it; the sight
lines, the traffic routes, where we can
place media is all going to be relative
to the whale, so you know we're not
placing the whale in a gallery, we're
building the gallery around the whale.
Knowing exactly what this collection of
bones will look like once it's put
together is far from obvious. 3d computer
models were created to test different
skeleton orientations. These allow the
museum staff to decide which position
would best suit the layout of the finished
gallery. This skeleton, the length of a
tractor trailer, has been stored in the
museum's collection since 1983. But
before this kit of parts can be
assembled,
hundreds of liters of congealed oil need
to be drained from its bones. Like the
museum building itself the whale
skeleton is undergoing a thorough
process of renovation, restoration and
preservation. Here, a lot of the bones
have developed cracking over the years.
What we're trying to do is give them
enough strength and durability to last a
very long time. But the building in its
present condition is not able to protect
the new displays nor allow visiting
exhibitions of rare and delicate
specimens to be shown. The building's
internal structure would first need to
be radically modified,
allowing for the first time, full control of its temperature and humidity.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
An added bonus from the building's
redesigned was an addition of a huge
garage door and loading dock in the back
so that big items like the dinosaur
models don't need to come in the front
door anymore for the first time coming
into this building we can now create a
proper path to actually manage
large-scale parcels large-scale exhibits
large-scale specimens and bring them
right into the building it has made such
an enormous difference for the kinds of
exhibits and the kinds of stories the
museum can tell today nearby the live
animal specialists are getting
acquainted with what will soon be the
museum's newest residence the water
gallery team is beginning to fill their
brand-new space one of the prominent new
features is an aquarium teeming with
local River life this is the first time
we've ever invested in such a
large-scale aquarium and they did a
beautiful job actually the gravel is
milled from local rock and that wood has
been built and molded to be the same as
a cedar root that you would find around
our River at any given time the goal is
to have at least ten species in the tank
whether they're also predator prey
issues that number is going to fluctuate
so it's been a real learning process and
where to find the fish how to collect
the fish these kinds of fish are not
located in a store stores we don't have
a fish RS for native local species
especially in Canada so everything has
to be wild caught by primitive
I think one of the nicest things that's
going to happen is that the visitors are
actually going to see the fish in the
tank and be able to go to an
identification panel and go that's what
that is I've always wondered what that
is
with the gallery teams hard at work
creating the new exhibitions another
part of the architectural team is
working on a modern solution to an old
problem perhaps the most visible
evidence of the museum's rebirth has
been the mysterious new glass structure
rising on the front in UARTs original
design a large stone tower formed a
focal point for the front of the
building the entrance has remained
without a tower since 1915
but beyond aesthetic considerations the
museum has a very practical need for a
new structure to be built on the
truncated base
when you are designed this building only
the ground and second floor were to be
publicly accessible than the third and
the fourth floor were for museum
administrators curators exhibition
designers etc and so the whole impetus
for re-engaging UARTs work the the
vestibule and building in that area had
to do with being able to create a place
where the public circulation could be
taken up from level 2 to 3 to 4 so our
analysis of the building called for
using the heritage atrium as a kind of
central focal point for all the
orientation of moving around this
building and then they said well what if
we still make something that sits on top
as we were doing before but just a
little more modest but still commanding
and let's not call it a tower let's call
it and someone said why don't we call it
a lantern the architectural team devised
a much lighter glass structure
incorporating a butterfly staircase the
new design was approved to be built but
one of the criteria was that the new
addition could not add extra weight to
the building or risk repeating history
the solution a novel concept of
suspending the glass from a steel frame
transferring the weight to the rest of
the building and anchoring to a new
floating foundation built beneath the
existing structure
the process of creating the lantern was
an incredible design and engineering
feat that required some very special
construction materials to pull it off a
hundred and sixty panels of
triple-glazed glass were crafted at
Pilkington Glass Works in England and
then transported to Ottawa
while hanging the glass from the top of
the structure solved one issue it
created another some of the panels broke
either during the long trip from
overseas or while they were being
attached to the lanterns framework
adding further delays to an already
tight schedule the glass people were on
the site last week as you know there's
six pieces of broken glass they want to
send it all to Pilkington in England and
work together on a solution as of this
morning actually they're going to
replace the four panes that broke
earlier and then bumping up against our
opening in May we're going to need a
plan B of course well the plan B is take
the inner piece out would there be an
issue though if we had to open with just
one piece of glass in the interior piece
of glass no because we definitely didn't
we'd have a double glazing leavitt so
and that's quite normal
yep but the lantern solution presented
many advantages
despite the construction difficulties I
mean this is one of the most interesting
moments in the entire experience of the
museum because this is right at the
interface between the top of the
vestibule of david' Ewart and the
beginning let's say of the glass harsh
portion of the lantern where history
meets the new architecture and where the
museum meets the city you can see that
eventually the butterflies there ascends
in this kind of scissor light
composition to the point where the
landings at the top allow you to look
outside the museum into the city and
some of the mid landings allow you to
look back into the heritage atrium so we
see this space as being a kind of
gallery where the story of the lantern
the architecture of the lantern and the
tower that was here before are all told
in a way that people can understand what
this the nature of construction the
nature of architecture and their
relationship to you know one of the
great heritage buildings in the country
some people will look at it and say from
an aesthetic perspective it is an
architectural statement and it reflects
a modern interpretation of what the
original intent of the architect might
be but really it's a signal that there
is a new museum I think everybody will
have a different interpretation and I
hope that it's something that people
talk about for many years to come I
think its innovative good it's an old
beautiful building but with the new
piece looks sort of spruces up and again
adds a little zest to it
I think it's cool to mix the modern with
the old style of the museum because it's
very castle like the museum and it's
always been that way and then they've
added the nice glass structure in the
front there so I think it's kind of cool
to mix both while the glass installers
work on the lantern the museum has set
its grand opening for international
biodiversity day in May
inside the museum work on the new
galleries is reaching the final stage
just be thankful time that let's say
there's someone that they this we track
on time was too distracted then basket
is Miss Manners well it's only a couple
specimen vary between Metheny girls
prefer bullies with cement again Canada
it's Quebec Expedia don't be trendy rush
Italian havoc predominance specimens
emotions live in evidently rushed here
it's a class best acai specimen the
Travelocity song enantiomers background
forensic second division a exceptional
said yes wiry the financial silly
composite the American agenda dark
energy appears disappear the Ruby TSX
Austin era absorbs the predictions oh my
god what we see what if tested is this
man that that you get a feel for what we
have a suspicious man that integrate and
it done in a minute make themself
whatever with only some cosmetic
finishing touches still to be done the
new earth gallery is nearly ready for
its first visitors the water gallery
looks just as its designers had
envisioned exciting new displays and
restored specimens are taking their
places around the centerpiece of the
gallery the magnificent blue whale
exhibit it was very busy today we had a
lot of the usual contractors been here
for weeks on end but we had some special
ones coming today as well we had to let
the back turtle installed this is a
beautiful model of a superlative animal
that's one of our top performers as a
marine reptile
and we also had a hydrothermal vent
diorama
which is a very complicated depiction of
the extraordinary life that's living it
it's a very exciting time for us right
now it's sort of like Christmas you know
we've all been shopping and it's all
coming in now we're very comfortable
that we'll have everything in place for
May 22nd
as construction nears its end the
building is being brought to life every
system in the building is being tested
like a living body each part in this
massive building must work with the
others in perfect synchronicity
I think people quite happy to see coming
to an end but quite pleased with results
that you see around us a saboteur
success double nuova JME Japan's
condition of our country is C even shop
Massacre even posted on the Civil War
the vivillon are tell mrs. Castle c2
Tagalog it is a sparkly CCC from all
cinemas special suffered a bow severe on
man
what people won't see is all of the work
that went behind the scenes I would love
people to walk into the space and just
look around and say it's absolutely
beautiful but hopefully they'll all
wonder what on earth the big deal was
now I've always asked myself what would
David you're think of what we were doing
with his building hundred years after he
designed and built it I'd really like to
have a conversation with you right now
if that was possible
and now at last the big day has arrived
great
- what
and deliriously happy to see the museum
finally occupied by the public it's a
dream come true
and I think that you're seeing people
here today taking over this public
monument this National Museum what it
made him feel really great I can't prove
it but I'm quite sure it would have been
that way
just truly overwhelming to see something
that you've worked on for so long and so
hard with so many people come together
like this the people I talked to today
they all talked about their memories
that they have of this museum and the
memories that they had as a child coming
here and how they're bringing their
children back and for us that is just so
touching because that's exactly where we
wanted it to be
what we were building what we were
creating or reconstructing was the
Museum of Natural History for the 21st
century
and I think we've done that
this museum has so many stories to tell
and to be able to observe people in
numbers chatting with each other as they
stand in front of these wonderful
dioramas or in front of the 65 foot
whale in the new water gallery we
couldn't ask for more of course you see
it under construction you wonder what's
going on exactly but when you're
actually inside it's an absolute marvel
it's really great to see so many people
here to enjoying the science and
everything their system it looks
fantastic
I think it's really child-friendly like
everything is on an eye level everything
is very nicely explained it's so open
and airy and light is a very inviting
place
I came here with a very deep feeling
about what National Museums could do and
could be for Canada
what is so fundamentally wonderful here
is that we've been given the opportunity
to make that real
you
you
you
you
