Oxford University Museum of Natural History architecture: Design and Decoration

Museum Origins

Oxford University Museum of Natural History opened in 1860. The Museum's Gothic Revival building was designed by the Irish architects, Deane and Woodward.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the University of Oxford did not have a coherent faculty dedicated to teaching science. Collections and facilities were scattered throughout the University and its colleges, often in ill-suited accommodation.

The Museum was designed to unite the disparate science departments and to provide the facilities needed to support a systematic university science education.

To achieve this aim, the project required determined campaigning by a small group of scientists working at the University of Oxford. The group included Charles Daubeny (1795-1867), head of Chemistry and Botany at the University, Robert Walker (1801-1865) representing Experimental Philosophy and Henry Acland (1815-1900), Professor of Medicine. Acland not only played a vital role in the Museum's conception and design but continued to champion the Museum's development until his retirement in 1894.

Oxford University Museum of Natural History predates another famous museum built in the Gothic Revival style, the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, by two decades. The project at Oxford was an experiment in how to configure and decorate a Victorian museum of natural history.

Portrait of the Museum's architect, Benjamin Woodward (1816-1861), OUMNH archives

Bronze bust of Henry Acland (1815-1900), by Joseph Edgar Boehm (1834-1890), OUMNH

Black and white photograph showing the building with scaffolding

Black and white photograph showing stone in front of the Museum entrance

Black and white photograph of the new building in 1860

The Museum's Interior

Ground Floor Plan

Layout and Use

Henry Acland believed that a university science museum ought to include resources for different types of teaching and learning. As a result, the Museum's interior was designed to include...

facilities for practical work,

and space to display the collections.

On the first floor, the entire west front of the Museum

was occupied by the library

and the main lecture theatre could originally seat 500 people.

Originally ten different branches of science were provided with departmental facilities in the new Museum. These facilities included laboratories, work rooms and departmental lecture theatres. The science professors and the architects worked together to design a building that provided staff and students with a customised environment for teaching and studying.

The interior of the Museum was arranged to allow easy communication between the different departments. The scientists involved in the design of the building saw nature to be a harmonious whole, designed by God. To understand nature, a holistic approach was needed which relied on close collaboration between different scientific disciplines.

Decorative Scheme

How the Museum's interior was going to function was not the only concern of those involved in its design. The interior's decoration was as carefully considered as the facilities it contained. It continues to test assumptions about the intellectual power of a building's interior decoration.

The interior's decorative features were intended to be educational as well as ornamental. The architects were key in the design of the Museum's interior decorative scheme but it also reflects the aims and aspirations of the scientists who would use the building and the wishes of the donors who funded the decoration.

Funding

The money allocated to the Museum project by the University only covered the building's basic construction. It did not allow for exterior or interior decoration, nor the furnishing of the Museum.

To remedy this, the Museum's governing body launched a fundraising campaign. They asked for donations towards the carving around the windows on the Museum's facade and towards the columns, carved capitals and sculpture in the central court.

By June 1860, 138 donors had given a total of £2440 towards the Museum's decorative scheme. Nowadays, this equates to approximately £140,000.

"Now the Contract provides very little ornament in the Interior; and some of those, who desire to give the Museum the most complete efficiency, propose, by private contributions, to obtain the following Additions for the purpose of adding both to the Scientific and Artistic Expression of the Edifice"
Public Subscription Request, May 1855, OUMNH

The Museum includes decoration in a wide range of different mediums. There is architectural and sculptural decoration, free-standing sculpture, painted schemes and bespoke furniture and fixtures. As well as the design and administrative input from the architects and professors, it required the skills of builders, metalworkers, painters, artists, sculptors, stone masons, cabinet makers and carpenters.

Central Court

At the heart of the Museum building is the central court. It is a unique space. It is lit from above by a glazed roof. This roof is supported by cast iron columns and girders with wrought iron botanical decoration. Covered walkways surround the four sides of the court, divided from the space by columns of different specimen stones surmounted by carved capitals.

The central court was designed to house and display the Museum's natural history collections. The collections were intended to be fundamental to study in the Museum, with the departmental facilities originally opening directly onto the central court.