Hawking Building review – the Science Museum’s giant new shed of the weird and wonderful | Architecture

Museum storage facilities are unseen wonders, dark troves of material in little-advertised places. They may contain 95% or more of an institution’s collections, some objects as fascinating and beautiful as those on view, others acquired for reasons long forgotten, doomed to lie on unknown shelves. They offer resources for researchers, exhibition content and updated permanent exhibitions, and a haven for artifacts that have nowhere else to go. They are necessary support for the work of the museum. They are the underwater part of the iceberg, the paddle parts of the swan, the dark side of the moon.

Now three of the country’s most significant reserve collections are moving into new multi-million pound facilities where, as well as being better cared for, they will be more accessible to the public. This change was prompted by a government plan announced in 2015 to sell Blythe House in west London, a baroque Edwardian office block converted in the 1970s into a shop for the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert and the Science Museum. The first of these has moved its objects to a a new collection of archaeological surveys at Shinfield, near Reading, and the second to V&A East Warehouse“a new kind of museum experience” which will open next year within the former 2012 Olympic Games media centre. in East London.

The Science Museum Groupwhich includes major museums in Manchester, Bradford, York and County Durham, as well as one in London, built the Hawking Building, on a former RAF airfield at Rowton outside Swindon, Wiltshire – a 545-acre site owned by the museum since 1979. this way. More than 300,000 objects have been moved into the new structure’s 33,000 square meters of floor space, both from Blythe House and from old hangars used for storage elsewhere on the airport. It is an achievement as much to record and remove as to build, taking a total of six years, with a total project cost of £65 million, of which £21 million was spent on construction.

Not only is the repository now more organized and in better condition than before, and served by new conservation laboratories and a photography studio, but the facility also offers new levels of access. This allows outside researchers, professionals and amateurs, to more easily see the Kenwood food mixers or Gartsherrie coal choppers that may be the object of their fascination. School parties can tour the collections for the first time. The general public can book guided tours – if difficult given that the last edition sold out in 24 hours.

The building combines the techniques of a distribution center with the aspirations of a museum. Wanting to achieve the biggest possible building for the money available, says Sian Williams, director of the museum One collection program, they “looked at what the supermarkets were doing” and ordered an efficient large shed from the species which Morrisons or Amazon could build, designed by the Leeds office GWP architecturewhich has experience with similar structures.

At the same time, they wanted it to be “more than a typical museum store” and they asked Sam Jacob Studiopurveyors of delightfully intelligent and highly imaginative architecture to elevate the visitor experience beyond the purely functional. He didn’t design much in terms of new building, except for an entrance pavilion still under construction to the entire former airport site, but his contribution was to think of ways to organize the material, especially the more dramatic elements, to increase their effect and help people orient themselves.

The result of the Science Museum’s approach is an overtly practical exterior, a metal barn painted military green so it can blend into the landscape. Inside, it’s a cross between a car boot sale and the tomb of a mechanical-minded pharaoh, a wonderland of paraphernalia that stretches from a double-decker Glasgow tram from 1901. to a Sno-cat crossing Antarctica to a rubber duck whose shape is so similar to Jupiter’s comet 67P /Churyumov-Gerasimenko that scientists used it to model a 2014 visit there by Philae lander. There are thousands of microscopes, more than 180 miner’s lamps and many typewriters. There’s a Blue Steel nuclear missile from the 1960s, without a warhead, and a graceful still-working electric car from 1916, made by the Detroit Electric Car Company, steered by a tiller rather than a wheel.

As museum curators say, their exhibits can be as valuable for the stories that come with them as for their scientific significance. An absurdly ornate rococo lathe said to have been used by Frederick the Great of Prussia stands next to a dirty white pressurized orb – a hydrogen balloon gondola in which Swiss Prof. Auguste Picard – the inspiration for Professor Calculus in the Tintin books – traveled in 1932. in the stratosphere. The content of Stephen Hawking’s officeincluding his voice synthesizer and such mundane objects as a tea bag squeezer are there, acquired by the museum while the project was underway, which is one of the reasons the building now bears the great physicist’s name.

The large objects are arranged in a tall space about the length and width of a football field, on a floor marked with a grid of white lines marked with numbers and colorful shapes—a combination, says Sam Jacob, of “a parking lot and a [painting by] Saul LeWitt”. The sites are arranged, he says, like buildings in city blocks, rising and falling in height and density, with a long, tall pile of vehicles on one side. Surrounding this hall are two levels filled with 18 miles of shelves, in long paths repeating and receding into infinity, each object marked with its own barcode. They carry everything from a syringe to a motorcycle, neatly arranged, with less ceremony and more immediacy than in a museum.

The whole thing is a world away from typical museum design. The spirit of the chairmanship is practical, aimed at helping the curators do their work. They can now, for example, see what they have more clearly and can photograph and film objects for the benefit of research requests from remote locations. Architectural art exists mostly as paint on the floor and fine placement choices. There are places, for example in an entrance sequence, that feel a little penniless when you could wish for a little more joy in the built fabric, but overall this is a project that has got its priorities right. Thanks to its content, it is also magnificent.

• For details of how to visit the Science and Innovation Park, Wroughton, Swindon, click here.