Entrance and East Hall Galleries
A proposal to simplify the Science Museum’s entrance experience, create a single accessible route into the collection and return the East Hall to its role as the museum’s principal place of orientation and gathering.
The Science Museum's entrance spaces and East Hall had accumulated a century of piecemeal additions, and the route into the collection had grown confusing with them. Nex was invited to prepare proposals for their redesign, with a brief to make orientation intuitive, introduce universal access, foreground the collection, and create flexible space for the museum's public programme.
The design removes accumulated additions to reveal the original building and clarify the visitor route. New glazed walls and doors divide the upper entrance concourse and reconnect the spaces around the visitor journey, so the sequence from street to collection reads clearly from the moment of arrival.
Within that sequence, the proposals introduce new curatorial devices we call Portals, as instruments of orientation and wonder. Large oak-encased openings hold holograms and Pepper's Ghost displays of objects from the collection, set against a black pigmented ground to remove visible depth behind the displays. Visitors meet them at key moments in the journey, each one combining orientation with an introduction to the collection.
The East Hall is taken back to its essentials and becomes the museum's central gathering place, a flexible platform for exhibitions and events. Key objects are rearranged to present the wider collection, so the hall introduces the whole museum in a single room.
