page_title: Otago Museum
section_title: Architecture and Development
hierarchical_section_title: Otago Museum / History / Architecture and Development
caption_attribution_description: English: The skeletons of Eastern moa (Emeus crassus), ostrich, and Fiordland penguin in Otago museum.
context_page_description: The Otago Museum is located in the city centre of Dunedin, New Zealand. It is adjacent to the University of Otago campus in Dunedin North, 1,500 metres northeast of the city centre. It is one of the city's leading attractions and has one of the largest museum collections in New Zealand. Natural science specimens and humanities artefacts from Otago, New Zealand and the world form the basis for long-term gallery displays. An interactive science centre within the Museum includes a large, immersive tropical butterfly rainforest environment.
context_section_description: With well over 100 years’ history on the current site, the Museum building is classified by the Historic Places Trust as a Category 1 historic place.
  The first substantial addition to the original Museum building on the Great King Street site was the Hocken Wing, which opened in 1910, housing Dr Thomas Hocken's collection of manuscripts. This collection now forms the basis of the Hocken Collections. Another new wing, named for benefactor Willi Fels was opened in 1930 and today houses the People of the World and Tangata Whenua galleries. A further expansion of the Museum occurred in 1963 when the Centennial Wing was opened to provide additional display space. With all of these separate developments, the Museum had grown to several times its original floor area, resulting in a confusing layout of multiple internally connected wings.
  A multi-stage redevelopment project in the 1990s and 2000s largely resolved this, with the addition of architect Ted McCoy's spectacular integrating central Atrium. The collection storage area was also redeveloped with specialised shelving and environmentally controlled storerooms. The redevelopment project reached a milestone in 2002 when the Southern Land, Southern People gallery was opened by Sir Edmund Hillary, along with the Governor General (then Dame Silvia Cartwright) and Prime Minister (then Helen Clark).
  The Museum's interactive science centre, Discovery World, opened In 1991. During the redevelopment it was moved from its original ground floor location to the first floor. The Tropical Forest, an immersive butterfly rainforest environment featuring the flora and fauna of the tropics, opened as a major addition to the science centre in 2007. Discovery World Tropical Forest has become an important visitor attraction in its own right. A planetarium was a further addition to the science centre in 2015. During 2017 the science centre was further redeveloped, and opened in December of that year as the 'Tūhura Otago Community Trust Science Centre'.
  2013 saw the opening of a redeveloped historic bluestone building on the Museum Reserve, which serves as an exhibition space and additional Museum venue. The building, now named the H. D. Skinner Annex after museum director Harry Skinner, was formerly a post office.
caption: The skeleton of an Eastern moa (Emeus crassus) compared to an Ostrich and Fiordland Crested penguin in the Otago museum.
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