 |
Architecture |
The new home for the Museum opened on June 29, 1989, on a 9.6- hectare (24-acre) site on the Quebec bank of the Ottawa River. The building is approximately 100,000 square metres (1,076,430 sq. ft.) and comprises two distinct structures:
1. the Museum Building (formerly the Glacier Wing), the public exhibition wing with over 25,000 square metres (270,000 sq. ft.) of display space; and
2. the Curatorial Building (formerly the Canadian Shield Wing), which houses the collections (3.5 million artifacts) as well as conservation laboratories and administration.
The design architect was Douglas Cardinal. Michel Languedoc, senior architect with the Montreal firm Tétreault, Parent, Languedoc et Associés, collaborated with Cardinal on the design of the Museum.
The architectural forms appear moulded more by natural forces than by human hand - this is distinctive of Cardinal's design style. Implicit in the names of the two wings is the building's symbolic depiction of the landscape at the end of the Ice Age, when humans first crossed into Canada.
Even the Manitoba limestone used as cladding holds time's secrets; millions of years old, it embodies fossils from the earliest epochs of the history of the land. The building is also characterized by the large walls of glass and the huge copper vaults and domes; there is more copper here than in any other building of the world.
