Our Wondrous Planet is Melbourne Museum’s largest-ever gallery — an expansive, 1,800-square-metre exhibition that reimagines how visitors experience the natural world. The gallery offers a multisensory journey through global biodiversity and sustainable futures, exploring humanity’s connection to nature through the lens of wonder.
Visitors embark on an epic voyage — from the frozen polar ice flats to vibrant coral reefs, through lush rainforests and into the hidden cosmos beneath the soil. Along the way, they discover their place within nature’s dynamic living network. Drawing on trusted scientific knowledge and storytelling, the experience inspires visitors to care for and nurture our wondrous planet for generations to come.
The gallery encompasses seven immersive spaces:
Four key ecosystems — Reef, Soil, Rainforest, and Ice — each celebrating the diversity of life.
Three thematic areas exploring sustainable futures, the tree of life, and First Peoples’ connection to Country.
At the gallery’s heart, a central immersive projection weaves together stories of the global systems that sustain life — from atmospheric and ocean currents to animal migrations. Featuring over 850 objects from the Victorian State Collections, Our Wondrous Planet stands as a testament to the intricate, interconnected beauty of Earth.
Corian® in the Gallery Design
Corian® was used in two key biomes — Soil and Ice — each pushing the material’s capabilities in distinct, sculptural ways.
In the Soil biome, organically curved interpretation rails were formed from Corian® Dove and fabricated by ACRT. The Soil zone features 23 unique Corian® rail sections, each curving in two directions to mimic the organic movement of an earthworm tunnelling through the soil. The rails were routed with interpretive text and filled with a hand-sprayed gradient finish by ACRT, creating a subtle, tactile play of colour and light.
In the Ice biome, Show Works fabricated 17 bespoke backlit Corian® shards and 11 glowing Corian® cubes, all crafted from Corian® River Pearl. Each shard is shaped to fit a unique joinery facet, evoking the fractured beauty of polar ice. The glowing Corian® cubes illuminate the Ice cave, highlighting displays of polar species and their secrets of survival.
Tracey Taylor from Museums Victoria said, “We had not used Corian® as a backlit material before on a large scale and were excited by the effectiveness of the translucent Corian® in the Ice area, where it becomes both a scenic element and a lighting element – an inspiration for our future projects.”
Corian® was selected for:
Durability: The gallery has a 10+ year lifespan and expected visitation of 1 million annually, with a significant proportion of family audiences; Corian® provides an extremely durable finish that can withstand high volumes of visitor interaction.
Flexibility: the design is incredibly bespoke, and Corian® is a flexible material that can be thermoformed, cut and welded to unique geometries with a beautiful, seamless finish.
Design Suitability: – Corian® offered a range of products, colours and textures that suited the design aspirations, allowing the designers to create both soft grey curves under the Soil and translucent, delicately textured surfaces in Ice.
A Vision of Hope and Wonder
Amid global climate and biodiversity challenges, Our Wondrous Planet offers a message of optimism. Rather than presenting statistics, it immerses visitors in emotional, sensory experiences that reignite a sense of wonder and belonging in the natural world.
The design captures nature’s essence through light, sound, and form — the chorus of a rainforest canopy, the shimmering reflection of polar ice, the vibrant geometry of a coral reef. Through these details, visitors are enveloped in vivid, atmospheric environments that invite connection and care for life on Earth.
The completed project has been overwhelmingly popular since opening, consistently rated as a visitor favourite at Melbourne Museum. Within two months of opening, the Corian® surfaces had already withstood thousands of visitors interacting with the displays and remained immaculate.
The luminous Ice shards and the organic Soil rails have become some of the most photographed and shared features of the exhibition by both visitors and design professionals. The project has been celebrated for its seamless integration of materials, with Corian® beautifully woven into the tapestry of finishes that bring the gallery’s design to life.
Ultimately, Our Wondrous Planet exemplifies how design innovation and material mastery can unite to foster connection, imagination, and hope — an immersive journey that encourages all who visit to see the world anew.
