Big bug idea

It's not original, outside the American Republican Party, to admire Charles Darwin, but the man leaves me helpless with awe.

It wasn't just that he created an audacious and world-changing scientific theory, which 150 years of subsequent discovery have served to validate ever more thoroughly and richly.

It is also that, having travelled the world and written a bestseller before the age of 30, he still felt the need to prove his scientific credentials by spending several years studying barnacles.

It is the persistence that is impressive, and the faith that dedication to something apparently trivial would lead to something great. Or, had greatness not materialised, the humble acceptance of his destiny as a fine chronicler of barnacles.

Those of us who work in the fuzzier world of the arts envy such faith in fact. The Natural History Museum has just completed a new £78 million building, named after Darwin, dedicated to the investigation of the seemingly insignificant.

It is part laboratory, part exhibition space and part filing cabinet for 20 million insect and plant specimens in 3.3km of cabinets
collected over 300 years, each identified, dated and located.

The museum doesn't know exactly why it has so many dead bugs, but it does know that without them the chance of unexpected discoveries would shrink.

The Darwin Centre, designed by the long-established Danish firm CF Møller Architects, replaces outdated and hazardous premises whose risks include, ironically, the munching of the dead insects by living beetles. Now they will be encased in thick-walled beetle-proof concrete which will also keep the temperature steady.

The new building creates gleaming white spaces for scientists to work in, just as they do in old sci-fi movies and toothpaste ads. It also seeks to advertise the fact that the Natural History Museum is not just a place to take children to gawp at dinosaurs; it is also a place of research.

The Darwin Centre addresses scientists' anxiety that, as they look up from their barnacles and bugs, the public are not paying them as much attention as they should, an anxiety justified by ignorant health scares that end up costing lives, and the terrifying percentage of Americans who believe that the universe was made in a week, and is 6,000 years old.

One of the last of the big Lottery-funded projects, a phase in architectural evolution that is passing into history, the Centre is, says the museum, "a statement of the importance of glass, as bold and confident as our original building".

The first big idea of the new building is the glass, to open up the hidden world of research to public view. The Darwin Centre is attached to the side of the original 1881 building in Cromwell Road and, in contrast with the old, teaming polychrome crust, presents a sheer transparent sheet, Scandinavian in its crispness, to the view from Queens Gate.

Inside, the accessibility theme continues with views provided, wherever possible, of boffins at work. Inside too, the second big idea is revealed: a 28-metre high "cocoon", a flattened pebble shape with a silky plaster finish whose lower half contains the collection, and whose upper half contains a public exhibition space where visitors will be able to wander down ramps past exhibits and information, punctuated with glimpses into the labs.

The cocoon is not yet fitted out, and will open to the public next year. Anna Maria Indrio, the partner at CF Møller in charge of the Darwin Centre, is fascinated with the space and wants us to be, too. Big and emphatic though it is, it is experienced obliquely. From the street it is seen encased in its vitrine, obscured by reflection, as if in a pool of water. Approaching from inside the museum, the visitor will see curved fragments of it before its entirety.

The cocoon shape is meant to evoke the insect world it encases and in this it taps into an endearing architectural tradition of making containers look like the thing contained. The mysterious 18th-century French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu proposed a cowshed that looked like a cow, and the contemporary critic Charles Jencks made an early reputation for himself unearthing hotdog stands shaped like hotdogs, and doughnut stands shaped like doughnuts.

Such mimicry is, of course, a non sequitur. A building containing bugs need no more look like their pupae than a shoe factory need look like a shoe. An actual cocoon, which can rest in the palm of your hand, has both intricacy and economy, and a fitting scale. Like a barnacle, it repays study. A blown-up, built one is less interesting. It doesn't actually tell you anything about nature. It works, if at all, as an enormous surreal joke. It could also work as what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin, the random device that gets a creative endeavour going.

Architecture has its own rewards, different from those of entomology, to do with the interaction of light, space, materials and the human activity that takes place within them, and the Darwin Centre offers some of these. But the spatial pleasures of the Darwin Centre are obstructed by the fascination with the cocoon. Its concave
interior creates a lot of surface on which it will be hard to place exhibits, and the public journey through it — up in a lift, down some ramps, down in a lift — will be tortuous.

The slight, delicate exhibits that will be presented to the public will be wrapped in an awful lot of architecture: they will be inside the cocoon, which is surrounded by air, which is wrapped in a grand glass atrium. The atrium heads purposefully northwards, as if large crowds are expected through it, but it doesn't head anywhere that justifies its grandeur. It also flanks a new outdoor public space, an entirely desirable asset, but the entrances from one to the other are perfunctory.

There is everything to like about the aims and ideals of the Darwin Centre, and much to like in the sharpness of its detail and the quality of its surfaces. It would just be a better building if the architects had been less obsessed with their big idea. Like scientists, they seem anxious that they're not interesting enough. They should relax.