The new Richard Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History raises the question of what role architecture can play in this fraught political, ecological, and cultural moment.
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As Gang, Walker, and other colleagues were preparing the design of the new wing, they descended far below Manhattan to observe the construction of the East Side Access project, the M.T.A.’s giant effort to connect the Long Island Rail Road to a new station beneath Grand Central Terminal. There they watched crews spray shotcrete onto rebar on the ceiling, creating a series of vaulted, cathedral-like spaces. There are also connections to shotcrete in the museum’s own history.
This raises the question, of course, of what specific role architecture can play in bolstering or backstopping science, or in creating a new museum wing robust enough to meet our fraught political, ecological, and cultural moment.
I don’t want to oversell the rationality of the new wing’s exterior—it has its own bulges and kinks, along with sculpturally rounded windows, with fritted, bird-safe glass, in a range of sizes—but, compared with the atrium behind it, what stands out is its aplomb.
In this effort, the Gilder Center is less successful. At the top of the main stair, a wide space that doubles as seating, visitors are met with a giant wall of white acoustic plaster, blank except for some subtle vertical and horizontal scoring—an architectural element so out of place that I asked one of my A.M.N.H. guides through the new building, Anne Canty, if it was temporary or signalled ongoing construction. Neither, she said.
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