WINNER - Niall McLaughlin Architects
The Natural History Museum is a great British icon and its role has steadily grown to encompass the full natural world, from rocks to rainfall. This is a major opportunity for the museum to reassess how a leading scientific and educational forum can organize and interpret its collections, research and education, spanning palaeontology to climate change.
Our concept is to release the grounds and buildings to flow in a way that creates space for the science and allows visitors to enjoy and understand the latest thinking on the natural world. The Waterhouse building is given back is calm landscape setting flanked to the east by a new green square at street level, with a caf� and exhibition space beneath, and to the west by a new garden researching the critical roles of water, soil, plants and air in the centre of a city. Universal access is made possible from South Kensington tube and the grounds unfold from east to west, telling the story of the earth from deep geology to future nature.