The Muf team – best known for curating the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2010 – treated the architectural design as an extension of the exhibition, aiming to create an immersive, playground-like experience.
They stripped back all the suspended ceilings and partitions within the third-floor Statoil Gallery, creating a more open-plan 2,300-square-metre space.
This space is divided up into different zones, with visitors free to wander to and fro, encountering a variety of objects on the way. All the principles demonstrated here can be grasped easily by anyone because they’re meant to be touched. You can blow tiny dry ice hurricanes across a lake. Stick your head in a box of fun mirrors to see infinite reflections. Bite on a metal prong and hear the sounds of a radio station vibrate directly into your brain. Lie on a roundabout next to the earth and spin round beneath a canopy of star lights curated by the European space agency. Hoist yourself up into the air on a pulley system. It’s is the ultimate science playground.
The team – led by directors Katherine Clarke and Liza Fior – describe the result as “a rich landscape” that encourages visitors “to roam guided by what catches their eye, rather than a pre-determined route and narrative”.
“Long vistas and a lack of rigid demarcation in the space encourage visitors to make connections between the different scientific phenomena and to move freely through the gallery,” they said.
Muf describes the Wonderlab as a set of “robust, hardworking spaces which also deliver a sense of grandeur and delight”.
“These details are a conscious reaction against the generic bright, wipe clean, panelled architecture of many schools and public spaces,” they said.
