Construction on the second phase of the Natural History Museum’s £76m Darwin Centre life sciences complex in London should be completed this summer, and the project is on track to open to the public in late 2009.

HGB Construction is building the 180,000sq ft (16,700sq m) structure, which was designed by C F Møller Architects of Denmark.

The museum has already obtained the full cost of the project through fundraising.

Phase one, which houses the museum’s 22 million specimens including animals and fish, opened in 2002. Phase two will preserve and care for the museum’s 28 million insects and six million plants, and contain a working research facility.

The building will also be a public space, where up to 2,500 visitors a day can take a self-guided tour offering a view into the research facility.

There will also be a new live communications space called the David Attenborough Studio, delivered in partnership with the BBC.

The studio will include access to a searchable audio-visual archive of the natural world, with links to the museum’s collections and research based on them, and learning programmes where members of the public can interact with scientists.

“The second phase of the Darwin Centre is the most significant development that the museum has undertaken since it moved to its present site in South Kensington in 1881,” said Neil Greenwood, project director of the scheme.

“It opens the doors on the Natural History Museum’s life as a major science infrastructure where, by using the museum’s internationally important collections, scientists deliver research that has a global impact,” he said.