When the plans first surfaced, I wondered if the Natural History Museum’s new Gilder Center would look overcooked.
From the outside, it’s a white-pink granite cliff with a yawning window shaped a bit like an opening to a cave, nestled in the museum’s splendid Romanesque Revival additions from the turn of the last century. Past the front door, that cliff face transforms. It becomes a towering canyon, an atrium disguised as a deep city block.
For the architect jeanne gang And her team, Guilder, was a gamble and a leap of faith that shattered today’s innocuous norms and begged accusations of almost starchy self-indulgence.
Now that it’s built, I love it.
I wouldn’t go so far as to identify it with Gaudí’s curvaceous genius or Saarinen’s groovy TWA Terminal, but it’s in the family. He is a poetic, joyful and theatrical work of public architecture, a flight of highly sophisticated sculptural fantasy. New Yorkers live to complain about new buildings. This seems destined to become a heart-pounding mega-attraction soon.
And for a significant part of that user base, the part that hasn’t even graduated middle school yet, I think it’s going to be simply awesome, like so many others at the museum.
A welcome shift in topic from the statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the museum’s Central Park West entrance, a suitable and long-awaited target for protesters after the murder of George Floyd. Since 1940, Roosevelt has been sitting on his charger, chest puffed, head high, looming over two depressed squires.
The museum received permission from the city last year to send the sculpture to North Dakota. Above all, it cleared the air of Guilder’s opening.
In 2014, the museum first unveiled plans for the Richard Gilder Science, Education and Innovation Center, a 230,000-square-foot addition. At the time, City Hall promised Guilder his $15 million against his then $325 million budget. The hope was to open by his 2019, the museum’s 150th anniversary. This is the first of natural history since the Rose Center for Earth and Space (a striking update by the Polshek Partnership of Étienne-Louis Boulle’s famous tribute to Newton in the form of a glass box containing a model of the solar system). It was the first major addition. Hayden Planetarium in 2000.
Gilder had to tear down some unloved backyard structures. They included the little-used Columbus Avenue entrance, where the West 79th Street dead end leads to a green ribbon called Theodore Roosevelt Park.
The new wing called for a customizable gallery for an insectarium and a butterfly greenhouse designed by Ralph Applebaum, both of which were excellent. The five-story warehouse houses approximately four million scientific specimens. On his third floor, tall windows reveal open exhibits to storage rooms.
Guilder also houses new classrooms, laboratories, a library and a nearly identical theater shaped like a hockey rink for state-of-the-art interactive exhibits on the interconnectedness of all life on Earth. increase.
To house it all, Gang’s gorge as an atrium flowed outside the park to define a stone façade. . After a research trip through the western United States, the architect began modeling weathered rock formations by carving ice.
All these suggestive folds and curves evoked elastic muscles and tendons.
Skeptics have asked if the whole thing is just an elaborate excuse to build a big new party space for the museum’s fundraisers. But Gilder needed to go big. This is because it has long been thought to link disconnected and far-flung parts of the museum.
Natural History evolved from the cross and square design devised by Calvert Voe and Jacob Ray Mold in the 1870s. Over the years, as he grew into one of the city’s big events, the museum piled up some 20 buildings of various historical styles, pieced together more and more like a mad quilt.
To regulars, the once dead-end galleries like the Gem and Mineral Gallery resembled Diagon Alley in Harry Potter: The Place of Secrets and Magic. It’s an ugly maze and could be a distribution fiasco.
Gilder doesn’t solve all problems. But some of Studio Gang’s most intelligent and complex creations help streamline visitor flows and create intuitive internal connections. This will allow people to focus on their collection rather than directions.
Delays plagued the project. Since 2014, the institution’s 150th anniversary has passed. Richard Gilder, the banker and philanthropist who financed New Wings, died in 2020. The budget climbed to $465 million as construction costs skyrocketed during the pandemic. City endowments he increased to $92 million. And Ellen Footer, longtime visionary president of Natural History, who spearheaded both the Rose Center and the Guilder Expansion, retired in March.
The pandemic was only part of the problem. The project also ran into headwinds from neighbors who filed legal challenges based on Gilder encroaching on a corner of the park. In 2019, the Appeals Division of the New York State Supreme Court finally dismissed Last challenge.
Continued negotiations with neighbors have reduced the footprint of the center within the park. Natural History also hired Landscape his lead architect Hilderbrand to preserve some of the trees that might have been cut down in earlier expansion plans and add seating.
I think it is a valid argument for the costly yearly public good of community involvement, which is sometimes acrimonious. It was good. The new park, where planting is still in progress, opens up previously closed green space and appears to be much more generous and graceful.
And Gilder itself should take visitors back to the museum’s roots with a concept of surprise. In the mid-19th century, before natural history existed, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in Lower Manhattan was the most popular museum in town. For more than 20 years, more visitors have reportedly paid the 25-cent entrance fee than there are people in the United States.
They went to a beautiful diorama and marveled at a ventriloquist, a glassblower and a band of 200 “educated” albino rats. Thinking of a mummified monkey head sewn into a salmon’s tail (Fiji he was called a mermaid), Tom he likes Sam or Ned the learning seal (hand a marine mammal playing his organ). ) and saw his star performances of pop at the time.
“Why can’t we have a popular museum in New York now?” asked The New York Times after Barnum’s museum burned down in 1868. City leaders agreed.
And from the ashes of Burnham’s delightful palace was born the American Museum of Natural History. This museum definitively preserved an important part of Barnum’s DNA.
Like Burnham’s Attic of Curiosity and Pleasure, natural history derives from the ‘cabinet of wonders’ that began to proliferate in Europe in the 16th century. This was a time of global exploration, colonial rule, humanist curiosity, and scientific progress. Wonder, a desirable state between joy and teaching, was a testament to the immense ingenuity of God.
But then the Illuminati replaced overwhelmed stand-ins like second-grade teachers, tipping the balance toward sober instruction. Wonders, Descartes warned, could “distort the use of reason.” And he had, by the 19th century, a mysterious cabinet succumbed to what we now think of as a modern encyclopedic museum.
The American Museum of Natural History has become Exhibit A of such an institution, imperialistic and greedy, hunting down exotic animals and cultural relics in the name of science and scholarship. Still, visitors came to marvel at the dinosaur bones and dioramas.
I was once inside a famous gorilla diorama. This diorama recreates the landscape of Central Africa and is the burial place of Carl Akely, the naturalist, inventor and ‘father of modern taxidermy’. His death there made front page news in 1926. Akeley killed the gorilla, took it home, and placed it in a diorama. Years ago, he rode Jumbo, the celebrity elephant, for Barnum.
Akeley digresses because he came up with a construction process called “shotcrete” that is still widely used today. This involves blasting concrete onto a rebar and metal mesh armature and then hand sculpting or troweling the wet concrete.
Gang’s canyon is made of Akeley shotcrete.
A computer program helped devise a parametric curve for the canyon. Gang has improved folds and pleats. Design firm Arup handled the structural engineering, ensuring that the entire structure could support itself (and its visitors) on very few columns embedded underground, like a jumbo playing a twister. .
It reminded me of a project the gang did ten years ago, just before Guilder got going. A small social justice center at Kalamazoo College in Michigan that includes a concave façade with cordwood masonry and portholes. Its construction also relied on the cooperation of the architects with the workers invited to do their best creatively.
Gilder’s result is architecture much like Richard Serra’s sculpture, emphasizing its own mass and materiality. The spray has a texture like sandpaper. The façade is not sheer veneer or glass, but matte Milford Pink stone, milled in the same granite quarry that John Russell Pope used to design his façade of the museum’s gorgeous Central Park West in the 1930s. .
In contrast, all these tactile surfaces accentuate the graceful role that light plays within the building. The Guilder, unlike most museums, is filled with bird-friendly fritted windows overlooking the city. Rough surfaces are reflected in details like the polished oak railings and bean-shaped staircase (it’s no surprise that the gang is an admirer of the great Japanese architect Toyo Ito). increase.
The gang dresses up the library’s single pillar to resemble an oversized mushroom stalk, with striped lights and ash panels branching out and gills along the ceiling. The Guilder facade, which so beautifully unites the eclectic architecture of the museums along the coast, glows among the park’s trees in the evening as it transitions to reds and greys.
Over the years, I’ve seen architects roll their eyes when they mention Gang’s Canyon. I’ve heard complaints that shotcrete isn’t the most sustainable material for a museum whose central themes are the sacredness of nature and the veracity of science, given climate change.
But many of the greenest buildings continue to be used and loved, which makes them the ones that last the longest. I grew up visiting Natural History and watched my children grow up there. Even today, I feel myself returning from another encounter with a giant squid model and a narwhal diorama, navigating the Gilder’s Cavern Gallery and squinting at the sun pouring through the transom and rose windows.
It’s not just the joy that comes from temporarily suspending one’s disbelief before returning to the streets and everyday life.
I guess I’d call it wonder.
