Extinction Museum

Dinosaurs are an unavoidable stage in every child’s passions. They belong to imagination before belonging to science. They are a trace of an incomprehensively distant time, of a different, wild Earth, of a still tumultuous and forming planet.

Ancient, monstrous, different.

Dinosaurs are an unavoidable stage in every child’s passions. They belong to imagination before belonging to science. They are a trace of an incomprehensively distant time, of a different, wild Earth, of a still tumultuous and forming planet.

A vanished world, which vicissitudes have eluded our accurate understanding for a long time. Meteor, volcanic eruption, climate change. Whatever the nemesis, dinosaurs are also the symbol of the precariousness of life on this planet, the paradigm of a terrible and topical concept: extinction.

Indeed, over the last 50 years there has been a loss of 69% of wild animal species. This confirms an irrefutable data: there is an ongoing new mass extinction, and the cause is fairly accurately mankind.

However, if mankind started this, mankind can also stop it.

For this reason, WWF created exhibition routes to show the world before history in an ancient volcanic crater, which is one of the places that is most intrinsically connected to the extinct world. It did so because starting from those creatures so rooted in our imagination, people can reflect upon the current risk for life on Earth.

For this reason, WWF created exhibition routes to show the world before history in an ancient volcanic crater, which is one of the places that is most intrinsically connected to the extinct world. It did so because starting from those creatures so rooted in our imagination, people can reflect upon the current risk for life on Earth.

What will be the next extinction? What can human beings do to protect themselves and the other living beings?

These are the questions underlying Extinction Museum. YAC and WWF’s competition aims at imagining in the ancient crater of a quiescent volcano a museum to display the last mass extinction- the extinction of dinosaurs- and inform about the current threats for living species.

A volcano, a glaciation, a meteor will not decide on life on this planet, mankind will. For the first time in the history of Earth, the future of life as we know it is in the hands of just one species. Therefore, places like Extinction Museum will become essential tools to raise awareness.

Before it is too late.

Yac thanks all the architects who will take up this challenge.