The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is months away from completing its NHM Commons project – the museum’s new wing and community hub, comprising approximately 75,000 square feet of new construction, renovated space and landscaping on the west end of the museum facing Exposition Park.

The project, costing roughly $75 million, is intended to expand the museum’s footprint and invite in more visitors, spurred partly by the development happening next door at the future Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. It was funded by a series of donations, $30 million of which came from Los Angeles County. Other donors include the Annenberg Foundation and the State of California.

“We wanted a new theater,” Lori Bettison-Varga, NHMLAC president and director, said, “but it was also really in response to how this park was changing and thinking about the fact that this really significant new cultural institution was coming into the park and how that was going to impact the way in which people were going to (wander) through the park and how we might help entice them to come into this space.”

Altogether, NHM Commons will include a new landscaped community plaza and museum entrance featuring indigenous artwork and planted trees, a multi-purpose 400-seat theater with retractable seating and flex space meant to host community events, a neighborhood coffee shop, and a welcome center with cork walls representing various layers of sedimentation.

Guests will be greeted by a 70-foot sauropod dinosaur with green bones – likely a composite of multiple dinosaurs – discovered by NHM’s Dinosaur Institute in Utah, as well as an 80-foot mural titled “L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective,” a 1981 art piece done by Barbara Carrasco as an ode to Los Angeles’ culture.

‘Discovering together’

With a special focus on education and youth engagement, Bettison-Varga said she hopes the new wing will activate the community by broadening the museum’s impact and appealing to a wider audience.

“We are so focused on community – uplifting community, supporting community and meeting them where their needs are,” Bettison-Varga said. “We see this as the space that really allows all those programs we’ve been doing to come to fruition in a much-needed dynamic, engaging footprint.”

The wing is being designed by Sawtelle-based architecture firm Frederick Fisher and Partners with additional landscape architecture by Studio-MLA.

“What most aspirations are these days is the museum as a community center,” architect Fred Fisher said. “It’s not just a place to go to look at art or look at dinosaurs. It’s a place to go (to be) part of the community. This is in a vibrant South Los Angeles community, and this is meant to be a place where people can go, with or without an agenda.”

The NHM Commons project first began in 2017. It is expected to open this fall.

“For those of us who have been in Los Angeles for a long time, to be involved with this institution is a great privilege,” Fisher said. “Because everybody has stories about the Natural History Museum. It’s a part of everybody’s life here.”

The Natural History Museum was established in 1913. Originally called the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art, the museum’s collection gradually outgrew the building’s capacity, and the original structure was expanded. In 1963, the art department relocated to its own museum in Hancock Park, now known as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.