Old Canada Hall Walkthrough

The Canadian Museum of History has posted a nice interview with Douglas Cardinal, the architect who designed the museum building back in the eighties. Cardinal is also the lead architect for the new Canadian History Hall (opening in 2017), which provides a nice bit of continuity.

I'm going to miss the old Canada Hall, though. Here's a walkthrough that Andrew and I shot on 28 August 2014, just four days before it closed for good.

I hope that the new hall retains the immersive quality of the old one.

Airplanes in 3D

My good friend and fellow Ottawa blogger Charles Akben-Marchand has posted some 3D photos of the storage facility of the Canada Aviation and Space Museum.

Grab some red-and-blue 3D glasses and check them out!

Take the Sci & Tech Reopening Survey!

The Canada Science and Technology Museum is soliciting public opinion on the plans for their reopening in 2017. There's only four days left to take their survey, featuring concept sketches of the new facade and new exhibits, so take it now!

My favourite thing is the plan for the Transportation exhibit. The locomotive room was always the coolest thing in the museum -- you don't have to be a train fanatic to get a kick out of a big room full of trains -- and judging from the picture above, they plan to extend the concept to canoes, bicycles, snowmobiles, and everything else. Looks awesome!

But that's just my opinion. Tell them what you think!

AMNH Digital Special Collections

I recently discovered an incredible resource on the website of the American Museum of Natural History: the Digital Special Collections.

It's a browsable and searchable archive of thousands of images from the museum's library: technical illustrations, photos from museum expeditions, and -- most dear to my heart -- photographs of long-gone exhibits and of exhibits under construction.

Here are two of my favourites. The information I've provided comes from a terrific book about the AMNH called Dinosaurs in the Attic.

This is a skeleton in the process of being mounted by the great osteologist Samuel Harmstead Chubb. It's the last mount he completed before he died in 1949: a donkey turning his neck to nibble at botfly eggs on his hind leg. Chubb is mounting the skeleton using his system of suspending each bone from a scaffold and making tiny adjustments until it's in exactly the right position.

Here's a photo from the Life Magazine archives of Chubb with the nearly-completed mount.

This is a social weaver bird nest in the final stage of installation in the Biology of Birds Hall. A whole flock of these birds will collectively build one huge thatched nest, and add to it each year. This particular nest -- as well as the crown of the acacia tree it was built in -- was collected in South Africa in 1925 by ornithologist Herbert Friedmann.

There are plenty more images to be discovered. Go explore!

Source:
Preston, D.J. 1986. Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion Into the American Museum of Natural History. Ballantine Books, New York, 308 pp.