Dinosaurs will be back when Peabody reopens
Yale’s museum aims to welcome visitors again in 2024
The Yale Peabody Museum building renovations are nearly done. For the next year, museum curators, staff and construction personnel will put the final touches on the building and reinstall exhibits for the reopening in 2024.
“I’ve been working on this for well over 15 years,” said Mark Simon of Centerbrook Architects and Planners, one of the architects on the project. Simon had worked on master plans well before the project started. “Eventually this plan came to be to everybody’s delight and surprise because it’s been so long.”
CT Insider was given a sneak peak at the museum on a tour with the architects and museum staff. In the new lobby, visitors are greeted by an information desk, instead of a ticket counter. The lobby entrance, once a narrow gothic arch congested by school groups has been widened. A new freight elevator, rated for 15,000 pounds has been installed, perfect for moving large objects, or whole tour groups.
“It’s going to change the experience for everybody, not just the students but for all the visitors,” said Chris Renton, spokesperson for the Yale Peabody Museum. “No knock on the old Peabody but it was loud and hard to have a museum experience with hundreds of kids blocking every path.”
The iconic squid will not be returning to the entrance, instead the tower interior will be festooned with climbing pterosaurs, posed as if they are using the interior as a rookery.
To accomplish all this, load-bearing stone masonry from the original French Gothic construction was painstakingly removed. The upper floors of the tower are now supported by newly-inserted steel beams. The polished floor shows the outlines of the old arches, intentionally leaving the history of the museum visible.
The way the architects described it was like they had shored up a standing Jenga tower without knocking it over.
The lobby leads directly into the new central gallery. Formerly a disused courtyard, the gallery is awash in sunlight streaming through skylights. Massive laminate beams support the new ceiling.
A 40-foot long Tylosaurus fossil, a large, predatory marine reptile hangs from wires, posed mid-hunt. In front of it the cast of a massive sea turtle, an Archelon, tries to escape. It’s missing a fin.
“We know it survived the attack because there was a certain amount of healing that is clear in the fossil,” said Renton.
The former courtyard was basically a ghost space, flanked by two separate buildings before. Nobody really used it. The architects left parts of the original exterior wall exposed, polished down the old floor and enclosed the courtyard with a new roof. An additional building was constructed to enclose the courtyard, seamlessly blended with the old building.
“There’s a joint so that the two buildings are seismically separated,” said Andrew Santinello, another architect on the project. He explained that they erected steel supports inside the courtyard while the roof was lifted off of the old building. “We basically build a ship in a bottle here.”
Classrooms, community space and a second-story walkway ring the space. The old walls contain parts of an entirely new HVAC, mechanical and electrical system.
In spite of that, and the massive open space, the courtyard is quiet. Instead of stone, the walls are covered in a sound-dampening plaster.
Building all of this wasn’t simple. The Yale Peabody Museum basically underwent reconstructive surgery while it was closed. The roof was removed for much of the construction.
New HVAC and machine systems were inserted, like implants, underneath it. Thousands of miles of fiber optic cable were strung through the building, enabling centralized, networked, climate, lighting, and exhibit control. New energy-efficient, bird-safe windows were installed.
Climate-controlled protection
Specimens and murals that couldn’t be removed were enclosed in their own, climate-controlled spaces, complete with seismometers to monitor vibration. Anything that needed to stay, had to be preserved. That includes the mural in the Great Hall and the full Edmontosaurus fossil attached to the wall.
“They had their own structures and their own mechanical systems to make sure the humidity stayed even,” said Simon. “We had vibration sensors to make sure we weren’t vibrating them in any way because we were moving some heavy metal.
This isn’t uncommon for museum renovations of this caliber. Jason Cadorette AIA an architect with New York City architecture firm Cooper Robertson, who has worked on museum renovations told CT Insider that protective measures had to be installed early for historic parts of buildings, specimens or murals that couldn’t be moved.
“You try to know ahead of time what you think you’re dealing with but it’s never that simple,” said Cadorette. “There’s always surprises once you start getting into the actual project.”
The Peabody wasn’t without its surprises. While nobody discovered any secret passages, a forgotten mural was found in one of the first-floor exhibit spaces. That mural isn’t one of the famous ones, it was added for an exhibit in the ’90s.
“It’s behind that drywall,” said Renton, indicating an area across from one of the new classrooms, down the hall from the extinct mammal exhibit. “It’s lovely, very pretty, we didn’t want to get rid of it but it didn’t serve a purpose. So, we just covered it up again.”
“We also found a couple beer cans tucked into the wall,” joked Renton. “I took one home.”
One of the biggest changes to the museum wasn’t something that could be seen during the tour. The second floor will be home to new exhibits instead of staff offices. Yale professors and students will have their own gallery spaces for rotating shows. A paleo-garden, showing living fossil plants will be placed in the courtyard. The entire layout of the second and third floors will be harmonized with the “circular” footpath of the first floor.
“When they originally built the building they had set out a circular pattern on the first floor that was sort of lost over time on the second and third floor. Those have returned with the new design,” said Renton. He explained that the first floor had originally guided visitors through time before bringing them back to the lobby. “In the Peabody’s original conception there was a lot of press written about it because it supported the idea of an evolutionary model of development.”
But none of that stuff is quite finished yet and it will come as exhibits are designed, curated and reinstalled. The iconic Brontosaurus fossil won’t be fully done until mid-June.
“There’s a number of large specimens still to come,” said Renton.
Specimens and murals that couldn’t be removed were enclosed in their own, climate-controlled spaces, complete with seismometers to monitor vibration. Anything that needed to stay, had to be preserved. That includes the mural in the Great Hall and the full Edmontosaurus fossil attached to the wall.