![]() ![]() The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco closed in 2003 and reopened in a Renzo Piano-designed building in 2008 with only one of the two diorama halls surviving the move. There are examples from all across the country. The worst offenders have scrapped the old dioramas, pillaging them for parts and banishing their remains to storage or garbage dumps. Others have left them alone and allowed them to fall into disrepair. Some museums have supercharged their century-old displays with gaudy interactive and multimedia features. Museum specialists call it the "diorama dilemma," and they've struggled to solve it for decades. Willard Boyd, former president of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, wrote in 1999 that dioramas "are often viewed by today's visitors as a dead zoo located in a dark tunnel." Since TV sets entered living rooms, and with so many subsequent technological innovations, natural history museums have agonized over what to do with their increasingly antiquated-seeming habitat dioramas. Today, dioramas are as endangered as many of the animals they portray. The form peaked around the 1920s, and interest began waning after World War II. "This sense of place and this sense of reality and a personal encounter is so strong that they are a real powerful medium for teaching science," Quinn says. More than just works of art, dioramas are true to science for decades, artists and scientists went into the field to collect specimens and their surroundings and replicate them exactly as they appeared. The displays consist of taxidermied animals, foreground props and artfully painted panoramic backgrounds. "These are what you might call the earliest version of virtual reality," says Stephen Quinn, who recently retired as senior project manager and longtime diorama artist at the AMNH. There's a chorus of whoas and oh my gods, and one kid says with awe, "It looks so real!"ĭioramas arose in the late 1800s, largely out of a desire to return to nature following the Industrial Revolution. A few display cases away, visitors are practically climbing over one another to get a better look at the jaguars. Not that one needs a personal connection to feel its power. The mule deer display triggers such an emotional response from Novacek because it reminds him of when he was a graduate student, studying extinct mammals near Devils Tower. Since museums began constructing them more than a century ago, habitat dioramas have carried millions of visitors to other times and places. ![]() Novacek, the museum's senior vice president and provost for science, folds his arms, shakes his head and says, "Just amazing." ![]() Another deer sniffs the sloping ground behind a needley shrub. A deer stands perched with its majestic antlers framing the Devils Tower rock formation painted in the background. It's so transporting," he says during a recent visit, without looking away from the diorama. The little amount of haze, the clouds floating by. The diorama, completed in the 1940s, is now one of at least 117 at the museum, and Michael Novacek's favorite display. President Teddy Roosevelt made it America's first national monument, and later a taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York visited the spot to collect mule deer specimens for a habitat diorama. Tech & Science Art Museums American museum of natural history ArsenicĪliens chose Devils Tower in Wyoming as their landing site in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ![]()
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