CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A city design review committee unanimously and enthusiastically approved the first segment of plans for the five-year, $150 million expansion of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History Thursday morning.

Simultaneously, a crew with chainsaws was already at work on the museum's Wade Oval site in University Circle removing diseased, dying or non-native trees as a prelude to heavier work.

"This is a very fast-track project," landscape architect Sonia Jakse Barone of AECOM, the lead local design firm working on the project, said in a meeting of the Euclid Corridor Design Review Committee at the Agora.

She and other members of the design team requested and received approval from the committee for site grading and utility work needed to relocate the museum's Perkins Wildlife Center from the north side of the museum complex to the south side.

The committee's action constituted a recommendation to the city's Planning Commission, which will consider the project Friday, and whose approval is required for a construction permit.

The new location of the center, which acts as an open-air zoo for rescued birds and animals native to Ohio, will face south across Jeptha Drive to the Cleveland Museum of Art's parking garage. Portions of the new center will also be visible from the west along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and from the east along Wade Oval Drive.

"Steggie," the museum's beloved outdoor sculpture of a stegosaurus, will be relocated as part of the plan, Barone and other designers said.

In a presentation about the project, the designers revealed new renderings showing what the Perkins Center will look like from surrounding streets.

The general thrust was that a combination of wrought iron and custom-designed wood fences would surround the new wildlife center and would be partially or substantially concealed by new greenery.

Architect Bill Mason of AECOM, formerly URS, described how visitors would be able to explore the new Perkins center on elevated or ground-level walkways enabling them to see rescued wild creatures including owls, a bald eagle, a porcupine, otters, foxes, raccoons and coyotes.

"It's an outdoor exhibit that hosts native plant habitats and live animals," he said. "It has a mission based on conservation, restoration and stewardship."

Renderings of the project displayed during the presentation included schematic, stripped-down views of the landscaped site with walls and fences fully exposed for clarity of understanding.

The renderings also included realistic images of the final state of the project with full greenery, indicating the intention to strive for a rich, lush appearance. (See the full presentation at the bottom of this post.)

Mason stressed that views around the rear side of the museum's complex, which now present a hard, brutal-looking functional appearance along MLK Drive would be vastly improved with new design elements and landscaping.

"Right now, you see scruffy woods and a giant loading door," he said, adding that the door "will be a lot smaller" in the future and that both sides of the approach drive would be reconfigured with a new West Garden treated as an extension of the city's Cultural Gardens, with new outdoor artwork.

"This provides a great salutation to those coming down MLK, coming down Opportunity Corridor, coming from Glenville," he said. "This is a whole new day. We're no longer turning out backs on people. We're going to welcome them."

The committee members liked what they saw.

"I think it's a really impressive design," said committee member Jeffrey Strean, director of design and architecture at the neighboring Cleveland Museum of Art.

The initial segment of the project presented to the design review body Thursday is part of the first phase of the museum's three-phase project.

The overall thrust is to give the nationally respected institution a sustainable, light-filled, high-tech home better suited to its mission and collections than the largely outdated and architecturally dull complex it now occupies, which is the end result of numerous ad hoc expansions since the institution moved to Wade Oval in 1958.

Designed by the nationally respected Denver architecture firm of Fentress Architects, with AECOM and other consultants on exhibits, sustainability and other specialties, the project will involve tearing down about a fifth of the museum's existing, 230,000-square-foot complex, and then rebuilding and expanding the footprint.

The completed facility will encompass roughly 300,000 square feet. The museum intends to remain at least partially open throughout the construction process.

The institution has raised about $50 million of the needed money in cash and pledges so far.

The project is aiming for Gold certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED program, short for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

The finished facility will include new features including a permanent exhibit and laboratory area on the north side of its complex, plus a multipurpose assembly hall capable of seating 500, along with an Ohio Gallery on the region's natural history, connected to the relocated Perkins Wildlife Center.

After Thursday's meeting, members of the design team said that all trees removed from the museum's property would be recycled either as mulch to be used on-site in future landscaping, or as habitat elements for wildlife or raw material for furniture to be used inside the museum.

They said that none of the trees removed from the site would go to a landfill.