“MET Studio’s willingness to absorb local culture has been crucial to its success in Taiwan.”
– FX Magazine

From tundra to mangroves, rainforest to desert, the Life on Earth gallery allowed visitors to discover the secrets of the world’s important ecosystems through full life-like environments and dioramas, interactive video, photography and props.

The National Museum of Natural Science asked MET to provide the people of Taiwan with a gallery of natural beauty unseen anywhere in Taiwan, and as good if not better than any of the galleries in the world’s most famous natural history museums.

To help us achieve this ambitious aim, we worked with a team from Academy Studio from San Francisco who had all worked for the California Academy of Natural Science. Our approach consisted of taking a team of MET designers, painters, sculptors and curators on a round the world trip to carry out detailed research on each environment to be displayed, including an arduous 6-day trip to the darkest parts of the Costa Rican rainforest.

After the huge success of the ‘Life on Earth’ gallery, the National Museum of Natural Science went on to engage MET Studio to design an ecology gallery that would tell the story of the natural environments of this subtropical island and its mountainous topography in line with our previous work.

Using the same team, MET again visited the many environments throughout Taiwan that were to be presented in the gallery, which included climbing the Nan Hu Circle Valley mountain range over a 5 day period with the aid of local sherpas.

MET designed the gallery in order to reconstruct four unique ecosystems (Da-jia River basin, Lian-hua-chih broad-leaved forest, An-ma-shan cloud forest and Nan-hu valley), also using AV to communicate the vulnerability of Taiwan’s diverse ecosystem to climate change.