CLEVELAND, Ohio — Like a dinosaur with the munchies, a bright yellow crawler excavator machine nibbled on a brick and glass vestibule in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s inner courtyard Tuesday and slowly crunched it to bits.

The demolition was part of the latest action last week in a multi-phase, decade-long expansion and renovation designed to bring a beloved but dowdy, chaotically organized cultural institution firmly into the 21st century.

Reviewing the museum’s recent progress, Sonia Winner, its president and executive director since 2018, said the project is on schedule and on budget since it trimmed its scope last year.

“It’s pretty amazing,’’ she said. “It’s actually happening. That’s what we’re so thrilled to say to the community.’’

A crawler excavator and a small front end loader were at work yesterday preparing the Cleveland Museum of Natural History courtyard for reconstruction this year as part of a $150 million expansion and renovation. Shortly after this photo was taken, the excavator demolished the small vestibule in the courtyard's far left corner.Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

Previous stages of the expansion and renovation included construction of a 300-space parking garage and the new, $14 million Ralph Perkins II Wildlife Center & Woods Garden, both completed under previous director Evalyn Gates.

The work under way

Elements of the project now under construction include a trio of “gateway” elements scheduled for completion in time for the museum’s 100th anniversary celebration in December.

Those projects include a revamp of the museum’s Murch Auditorium and the Current Science Area, located off the museum’s main lobby, where staff researchers and scientists will discuss newsy topics such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or new discoveries made by the staff.

A rendering by DLR Group Cleveland shows what the renovated Murch Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History will look like by December. The auditorium will have improved acoustics, lighting and audio visual equipment with broadcast capacity, but will go from 495 to 445 seats.DLR Group Cleveland

Also on tap for completion in December is a re-do of the museum’s Smith Environmental Courtyard. Hence, the demolition underway Tuesday as a prelude to construction.

When rebuilt, the courtyard will include a paved area with a relief map of the Cuyahoga River watershed and a one-story-high waterfall resembling cascades running over thin layers of shale typical of the region.

Coming next year

Bigger things are on the near horizon. Last June, the museum unveiled a revamped design for the upcoming major phases of the $150 million project. Winner said it has now raised $87 million of that amount.

The original renovation and expansion concept, unveiled in 2015, would have remodeled the museum’s dark, visually dull brick entry façade built in 1971 with a new, 110,000-square-foot exhibit wing designed to resemble a slice of a fault block mountain erupting from the earth.

After recent revisions, the new idea is to enclose a 50,000-sqare-foot new exhibit wing in a structure that looks like an arm of a glacier melting into a lake.

Authored by the Cleveland office of DLR Group, the new design calls for a curvy, flowing, snow-white roof made of cast concrete panels, with glassy facades and horizontal sun baffles designed to evoke rippling waves on water when viewed from a distance.

The switch in concepts, and the reduction in scope, brought the estimated cost back in line with the available budget, the museum reported last year. It also provided more regionally appropriate imagery evoking the importance of ice and water to Northeast Ohio’s natural history.

The change followed the museum’s switch in designers from Denver-based Fentress Architects, which proposed the Rocky Mountain look, to DLR, which came up with the glacier concept.

Since then, the DLR office, formerly known as Westlake Reed Leskosky, has refined the design and worked with Boston-based Sasaki to elaborate plans for landscaping in the museum’s front yard along Wade Oval.

The idea here, naturally enough, is to create something that resembles a glacial moraine — the rolling terrain left behind when the ice melts. The museum’s beloved outdoor “Steggie” stegosaurus sculpture, will be part of the package.

On Thursday, the city’s Euclid Corridor Design Review Committee approved the early stage “schematic” designs for the building and landscape, which are under the committee’s purview. The city’s planning commission followed suit on Friday.

The museum sought the approvals to keep it on track to obtain construction permits and break ground in early 2021 for the new exhibit wing, which will occupy the former side of the museum’s Perkins Wildlife Center, plus a new main lobby, café and store that will wrap and enclose the museum’s existing brick facade.

A new transparency

Those new elements are all designed to turn a transparent face toward Wade Oval, in contrast to the dark, closed-off appearance of the existing brick facade, said architect Paul Westlake, a DLR principal.

“I think it’s the shock of transparency for an institution that’s so buttoned up now,’’ he said.

“It’s going to be so inviting,’’ he added. “It displays content and artifacts, activity of people within it, and it connects people to the [Wade] Oval, the greatest cultural site in Ohio.”

The museum, which draws 260,000 visitors a year, has a lot to show off. It has 5 million artifacts and specimens in its permanent collection.

The museum estimates that after a year of installing exhibits, it will open the new exhibit wing in 2023 and plans to remain open throughout the process. Additional parts of the project are scheduled for completion by 2026.

The museum announced in January it had hired Patrick Gallagher & Associates of Washington, D.C., as the exhibit designer.

Gallagher’s other local credits include Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the May 4 Visitors Center at Kent State University, and the “Violins of Hope” exhibition at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood.

The museum is in the early stages of designing the new exhibits with Gallagher.

“Natural history museums have always told the story of life on a timeline: past, present and future,’’ Winner said.

“We’re trying to tell the story about humans, and how this museum is about us and the impact we are having on our environment and on our world, both positive and negative.”

NOTE: This story has been updated to include approval of the museum’s plans by the City Planning Commission on Friday.