Kai Nip

The sustainability movement has often involved trying to keep millennium-old fossils, the emissions of which are the world’s biggest contributors to climate change, buried deep beneath the earth. At the Peabody Museum, though, sustainability has meant giving them new life. 

After four years of work, Yale is wrapping up renovations on its 98-year-old natural history museum. The updated building, which is set for completion in April 2024, will come outfitted with a variety of architectural and sustainability improvements, as well as expanded classrooms and new spaces for community events. The museum looks to combine its new commitment to sustainability with a slate of new exhibits aimed at creating a more immersive experience for visitors. 

“The overall vision for the project was to focus on connecting the museum more fully with the mission of Yale,” said David Skelly, School of the Environment professor and director of the Peabody Museum.

Skelly added that museumgoers can expect to set foot into a dramatically reimagined space. In addition to 50 percent more exhibition area, the museum will feature five new classrooms embedded within the galleries. Museum administrators hope that these classrooms will better support evolutionary-related research work such as fossil casting and micro-CT scanning, improving scientific teaching across campus.

According to Skelly, the renovations have been part of an effort to create a more eco-minded, community-based museum. The original Peabody “wasn’t constructed with the kinds of activities and programs and needs we had in mind,” he said, and bringing the architectural dinosaur into the 21st century has not always been easy.

Project architect Andrew Santaniello explained that, in organizing the design around Yale’s sustainability guidelines, the construction work had focused on “energy,” “water,” “movement” and “health and wellbeing.” The LEED-Gold-certified building is expected to halve its energy usage while increasing its total size by 57,000 square feet. In an email to the News, Santaniello added that the project reached 65 percent and 30 percent reduction in outdoor and indoor water use, respectively.

Santaniello said that these renovations incorporated sustainability into the construction process: the project diverted “over 80%” of waste from landfills and prioritized materials with recycled content and environmental product declarations. He noted that contractors and LEED — leadership in energy and environmental design — administrators met biweekly to ensure that the project was on track to meeting its sustainable goals.

Though the Peabody may not center sustainability as prominently as Kroon Hall — home to the School of the Environment — Skelly added that creating a greener museum within the constraints of its existing architecture required just as much design and planning.

The energy reductions come after years of research and retrofitting. The museum’s newly insulated walls allow the building to maintain its temperatures for longer. And rather than sustaining rigid temperature set points through simultaneous cooling and heating, the building’s new temperature regulating system sets the temperature in a range, dramatically reducing energy use, especially at night, according to Skelly.

He added that the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art and libraries could follow suit in adopting the new temperature management techniques. 

Once opened, the museum will also aim to bring the University and the greater New Haven community together.

“[We] hope to both make our collections more interesting and accessible to a wider number of people but also to better situate us as a museum as part of the community and as part of New Haven,” Kailen Rogers, the Peabody’s associate director of exhibitions, told the News.

Skelly said that the Peabody’s upcoming exhibits look to expand upon its reputation for evolutionary sciences. The museum will provide a permanent showcase for its history of science and technology collections, which include Yale’s first microscope from 1734 and the world’s oldest particle accelerator, created in the 1930s. Skelly explained that opening new galleries and exhibits not traditionally associated with dinosaurs and rocks will give more people a “reason to feel connected to the Peabody.”

The museum’s galleries will also integrate multimedia elements and audiovisual content, according to Rogers. One of the anticipated displays is “Eternal Cities,” a sculpture by Mohamad Hafez, owner of Westville’s Pistachio Cafe and a New Haven artist. The artwork — which incorporates 3D prints and materials from the Yale Babylonian collection — celebrates the Syrian diaspora.

In addition to its classrooms, the Peabody will provide specialized space for K-12 school visits and summer camps. “Evolutions,” the museum’s free after-school program, provides New Haven-area high schoolers with college-level science exposure. 

Among the Peabody’s new priorities include making space for more student and community voices. Skelly and Rogers explained that the museum wants to increase student involvement in its activities and to eventually have at least 10 percent of its gallery labels written by people outside the staff curatorial team. Students at Sci.CORPS, a science career readiness program offered by the Evolutions program, have recently collaborated with the Urban Resources Initiative to create a gallery showcasing urban canopy coverage, and they have developed an exhibit about food in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt with the Sanctuary Kitchen.

“Our goal is to increase the number and range of people that visitors are going to encounter as storytellers and as experts in the process,” said Rogers.

Rogers also emphasized the Peabody’s focus on accessibility, adding that the museum had worked closely with Accessibility Partners and invited low-vision groups to test out prototypes of tactile murals.

The Peabody’s team had to steer renovations through the difficulties of the pandemic. The project had been planned to start in July 2020 but COVID-19 caused months of delays, forcing museum administrators to navigate a much more “different process” than initially imagined, according to Rogers.

While the museum’s formal opening date remains unclear, Skelly added that a re-opening celebration is tentatively scheduled for April 17.

“There are lots of things that we’re really not going to know until we’re up and running for a little while,” said Kailen. “I appreciate that spirit … of experimentation, a willingness to be flexible once we have more information.”

The Peabody Museum was founded in 1866, opening initially on the side of Saybrook College in 1867.

Correction, Nov. 11: A previous version of this article misstated Andrew Santaniello’s name.