Yale Peabody Museum
Centerbrook Architects and Planners redesigned the Yale Peabody Museum, focusing on enhancing student engagement, exhibit spaces, sustainability, and wayfinding, while preserving the museum’s character and history.
The Yale Peabody Museum’s comprehensive renovations and additions are its first major changes since opening in 1925.
Completed in 2024, and based on 10 years of master planning, the project fulfilled goals to:
• Increase Yale student engagement, collections-based teaching, exhibit space and programming potential, and main campus collection capacity
• Improve wayfinding
• Enhance K-12 learning
• Relocate loading dock
• Advance sustainability
• Preserve Peabody’s characterFossils were remounted, anthropological exhibits increased, natural history exhibits refurbished, and historic dioramas restored. All exhibits include digitally interactive information modes.
Lower floor collections were improved with state-of-the-art climactic control, research and restoration labs, and storage systems. Collections were re-visioned with growth, rehousing, and secure storage in mind. A new lower-level learning center hosts K-12 students.
To engage undergraduates, new classrooms were added. A new north court and entry welcomes the Yale community while the building’s public entry remains, expanded.
The project encompasses 172,355-square-feet between renovated spaces and new construction. New construction primarily consists of a 57,631-square-foot, four-story infill addition between the Peabody and neighboring Environmental Science Center (ESC). The addition features a glass entrance tower that faces the adjacent Kline Geology Laboratory (KGL) and a skylit four-story central gathering space.
The museum employs strategies to reduce its environmental footprint, including horizontal lines on exterior glass to prevent bird strikes. With state-of-the-art mechanical systems and an improved building envelope, the building is predicted to use less energy, even with added space. Other strategies include improving indoor environmental quality, reducing waste in construction and operation, consuming less water indoors and outdoors, and mitigating stormwater runoff.
Design: Centerbrook Architects and Planners
Design Team: Mark Simon, Andrew Santaniello, Justin Hedde, David O’Connor, David Petersen, Sheryl Milardo
Contractor: Turner Construction Company
Photography: Peter Aaron | OTTO
