Neutelings Riedijk Architects and Iris van Herpen have wrapped the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in over 1000 metres of delicate concrete friezes that merge fossil forms with the fabric of the designer's collections.
Neutelings Riedijk Architects and Van Herpen collaborated to design the extension to the natural history museum in Leiden, the Netherlands, which is the couture fashion designer's first full-scale architectural project.

The extension to the existing Fons Verheijen-designed museum, which was completed in 1998, includes five floors of gallery space to display items from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center's collection of forty-two million objects.
As part of the project, Neutelings Riedijk Architects has also refurbished the existing building, which now also contains office space and storage facilities.
The new building consists of two distinct elements ? a stack of four offset rectangular blocks and a 36-metre-high atrium.
Each of the orange stone blocks, which contain the museum's nine galleries, is wrapped in a frieze designed by Van Herpen that combines couture fashion with rock formations and fossils.
"I thought of the beautiful work of marble sculptors like Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the way they captured soft pleated silk in stone so beautifully and so delicately," said Van Herpen.
"The intention really was not to go away from my couture process too much, but instead to still it, and to disembody it," she told Dezeen.

Each of the 263 pa...