Tag Archives: natural history museum

DHA Design Hintze Hall project shortlisted at 2018 Lighting Design Awards

May 3rd, this Thursday, sees the presentation of the 2018 Lighting Design Awards, by Lighting Magazine, at London’s Park Lane Hotel.

Sixteen awards will be presented, in categories that range from best lighting art installation to best lighting manufacturer. Over three hundred entries were submitted, reduced to a shortlist of 65 entries across the categories.

DHA Designs are delighted to have been shortlisted in the Heritage category for the Hintze Hall project, designed as part of Casson Mann’s revised exhibition scheme for this ‘cathedral of nature, which has already won a prized D&AD pencil in their Spatial Design category & has also been shortlisted at the 2018 Museum & Heritage Awards for their best new permanent exhibition award.

Only three entries were shortlisted for the Heritage category, and the other schemes by Ingenieure Bamberger & ÅF Lighting are very strong, so competition for this category will be great indeed. We look forward to the evening, and seeing which of the three entries was judged the winner.

 

Hope, the blue whale, stars in the newly re-opened Hintze Hall at the Natural History Museum

After a three-year design and construction process, the Hintze Hall was opened to the public on the 18th July. The star of the space is Hope, the female blue whale who beached in Ireland, 126 years ago. Hope has been hung in a dynamic, diving pose, to greet visitors as they come through the entrance doors to the museum. DHA Designs worked with the renowned exhibition design company, Casson Mann, on re-lighting the entire hall and the new exhibits, which showcase some of the star items in the Natural History Museum’s enormous collections of flora and fauna.

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Hintze Hall

DHA’s lighting scheme sought to give the space the ‘cathedral of nature’ that the hall is known for, replacing an ageing and inefficient scheme that had little flexibility for events and evening uses of the museum, which are very popular. Further, an entirely LED-based system was used, including all of the showcase internal lighting, to reduce the maintenance and energy costs in this enormous space, and the control system allows the museum staff to switch from museum to event use at just the press of a button.

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Hope, the Blue Whale

The new hall has been described glowingly in the press, and a fitting tribute to the conservation and preservation work that the museum is known globally for.

DHA also produced the lighting scheme for the coinciding exhibition – Whales: Beneath thesurface. As a Blue Whale becomes the must-see display of the Museum, visitors can dive deeper into the mysterious world of Cetaceans in the new summer family exhibition.