The official visitor centre of the Cradle of Humankind National Heritage Site
Maropeng is the official visitor centre of the Cradle of Humankind National Heritage Site in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is an award-winning exhibition that focuses on the development of humans over the past few million years, from the formation of the planet through all the evolutionary processes that have resulted in the world as it is today. The exhibition is self-guided and includes an underground boat ride that leads to 2 500m2 of underground exhibition space that tells the story of humanity.
Experience Lab and Virtual Lab
Digital Fabric formed a part of the original Maropeng professional team in 2006, which also oversaw the nearby Sterkfontein Cave visitor centre project. Recently, we completed several new spaces with multi-disciplinary design firm Office 24/7 Architecture. The Experience Lab is an interactive space with a playful approach to the content. Whilst it is aimed at a younger audience, it provides equally good value to adults and doubles as an informal and unusual presentation venue for public lectures.
The implementation of the highly complex exhibit space required a hands-on approach, and aside from our usual roles of AV and lighting design our involvement ranged from design development to production oversight, project management and executive production of animated short-films for the exhibit screens. The entire exhibit was created from CNC-cut plywood with a great number of structural and fire planning considerations. The exhibits include high resolution cameras, live microscopes and 3D printed skeletons and fossils.
The virtual lab
At the centre of the space is a Virtual Lab, quite literally a sealed glass and aluminium enclosure that can safely accommodate live fossil preparators in a fully equipped lab environment.
The Temporary Galleries
This same team oversaw the refurbishment of a space that previously housed general offices into a high-quality temporary exhibition gallery with bespoke large display cases suitable for any scale of temporary exhibitions. Designed by Office 24/7 Architecture, the space adds a new dimension of flexibility to the operations team at Maropeng, in an area of research that is constantly generating new and ground-breaking discoveries.