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This spectacular new museum could be a skeleton, a cave, or the fabric of the universe

The Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC builds science metaphors into its structure.

This spectacular new museum could be a skeleton, a cave, or the fabric of the universe

[Photo: Iwan Baan/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

BY Nate Berg6 minute read

When talking (or writing) about buildings, a favored and useful analogy is the skeleton. Buildings are often said to have “good bones”—the structural design that allows a space to be outfitted nicely, lit well, traversed smoothly, and used effectively. Good bones make the building. And just like in an animal’s skeleton, they’re evident but tucked away.

[Photo: Iwan Baan/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

For the most striking new building to open in architecturally gifted New York City, the good bones are not only on full display, the good bones are the building itself.

[Photo: Iwan Baan/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

The American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, designed by the Chicago-based architecture firm Studio Gang, has a rib cage of a facade and a bird bone of an interior. Covering 230,000 square feet and six aboveground floors, the new center is a long-planned addition to the museum’s campus, with exhibition halls, science labs, collections storage and displays, along with classrooms and a library.

[Photo: Alvaro Keding/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

Inside, there are exhibitions on zoology, paleontology, geology, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as a butterfly vivarium and a decidedly of-the-moment immersive experience looking at networks of life in nature at scales both visible and invisible. These spaces all radiate out from a connecting central atrium that is the Gilder Center’s showpiece, which is a swooping, Swiss cheese monolith of raw concrete.

[Photo: Iwan Baan/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

The atrium’s walls bend and move to become staircases and bridges, and open up to form entrances to exhibition halls or views through and out of the buildings. It resembles the hollow-but-buttressed inside of birds’ bones sliced open and viewed through a microscope, strong enough to provide structure but light enough to allow them to take off.

[Photo: Alvaro Keding/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

The five-story interior atrium has more often been compared, not wrongly, to a cave or a canyon. (Studio Gang visited canyons in the Southwest to get a feel for the curves and forms carved through geologic time.) Its organic, meandering walls are covered in rough shotcrete, a form of concrete that is sprayed out of a hose over an armature, like frosting spread on a cake.

[Photo: Iwan Baan/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

Studio Gang partner Weston Walker says the selection of shotcrete was one of the most important design decisions, one that connects with the museum’s goal of educating about science. The material’s simplicity—a combination of sand, aggregate, and water—allows visitors to more easily understand the building’s structure, at least more than one hidden away behind rectilinear drywall. Shotcrete also allowed more earthly forms to emerge.

“It is a fluid and it’s possible to express flow really directly with this material. And it’s not limited to geology,” Walker esplains. Not surprisingly, staff and curators at the American Museum of Natural History saw their own parallels, from skeletons to muscular tissues to the fabric of the universe. “It’s evoking the forces of nature on material,” Walker says.

[Photo: Iwan Baan/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

Originally announced in 2014, the project has evolved and ballooned and stretched over the years, with its initial $325 million budget growing to $465 million. The center opened to the public May 4, about four years later than anticipated. For a project of this scope, delays and budget bumps are not unexpected, but the pandemic’s effect on materials and costs didn’t help.

The Gilder Center is Studio Gang’s second major museum project to open this year, and both had similar goals. The other project, a renovation of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, focused on the unification of eight structures and additions built over several decades, which the architects connected with a swooping and expressive new spine. The Gilder Center’s big move is a vertical version of that connection.

[Photo: Alvaro Keding/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

Walker calls the atrium an “orienting device” for the different spaces and activities within the center. “It’s shaping sight lines and making really clear access paths,” he says. “We want to make the programs and the science accessible physically and accessible visually. The museum calls it de-bricking the science.”

Accessibility goes beyond the center itself, which is just one part of a multibuilding campus. Ten buildings immediately surround the Gilder Center, and it connects to those other buildings in 33 different places across five floors. “We had almost a three-dimensional web of connectivity constraints that we needed to weave together,” Walker explains. The fluid form of the atrium and its bone-like structural connections proved a viable solution.

[Photo: Iwan Baan/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

Those connections also helped solve a bigger problem in preexisting exhibition spaces, several of which had glaring dead ends that required visitors to backtrack through long halls of gems or dinosaur bones to see something else or to exit the building. The Gilder Center and its atrium offer more routes to explore or escape.

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[Photo: Alvaro Keding/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

There are 18 classrooms and educational spaces, underscoring the primary audience of the museum: schoolkids. Walker says the flood of children on family outings and school field trips required the design to have an added layer of accommodation. “It is truly for everybody, but we needed to make it work for little humans,” he says.

One main example is that the space within the campus where school buses drop off visitors now leads directly into one of the Gilder Center’s highlights: the 5,000-square-foot Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium, with exhibits on oversize insect habitats and the process of pollination.

“Kids come into the space from the school bus into this world of insects. Their scale changes. And then they come into the atrium after that,” Walker says. “That sequence is interesting, I think, and powerful for kids.”

[Photo: Alvaro Keding/courtesy American Museum of Natural History]

Walker says the educational goals of the museum informed the architectural approach. There’s an inside-out logic to the design, which takes the bone-like atrium out to the museum’s facade and street frontage, luring passersby with its bold form and big, between-the-ribs windows.

There’s also, Walker says, an outside-in logic, with the surrounding buildings influencing the look and feel of the space. Lines inside the new building and its facade connect to those in its neighboring buildings, and the facade’s granite matches the stone used on the museum’s entrance, which fronts Central Park. In fact, it was dug out from the same quarry in Massachusetts, which was reopened specially for this project.

Pushing those contextual connections was as important for the architects as it was for the museum, which has found itself in a somewhat unexpected jumble of buildings, many added on over time and out of step with the original master plan for the site, designed as a quadrangle of buildings and courtyards in the late 1800s.

As the museum has grown since its opening in 1880, it has expanded in ways not originally intended, filling in those courtyards and stranding some galleries in unfriendly dead ends. Zooming out, the Gilder Center helps address these issues. But it’s also, unashamedly, making its own mark on a campus that continues to change in the Darwinian sense.

“It’s an incredible collection of historical buildings. Each one was kind of best in class and expressive of what architecture was seen to be at that time,” Walker says. “We see the Gilder Center as the next evolution of that.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nate Berg is a staff writer at Fast Company, where he writes about design, architecture, urban development, and industrial design. He has written for publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Wired, the Guardian, Dwell, Wallpaper, and Curbed More


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