COST of WI blends art and engineering for new Gilder Center-IPM

It’s rare that a building’s design can become so immediately iconic – an attraction unto itself. Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona comes to mind. It is a visual feast – a sculpture that takes the shape of a building. Many architecture critics are already claiming the same for the newly opened Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Officially named the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, the addition to AMNH is the icing on a very prestigious cake. AMNH boasted five million visitors in 2019 (the most recent year the TEA/AECOM Theme Index ranked museums). It is the ninth most-visited museum in the world, and in North America it is second only to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (also in New York City).

The Gilder Center is a 230,000 sq-ft addition that boasts 33 individual connections across four levels to 10 other buildings on the AMNH campus. In addition to helping unify the museum, Gilder houses impressive exhibits including an insectarium, the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium, new collection displays and the immersive Invisible Worlds experience, a projection-mapped environment that takes guests to scientific and natural realms nearly impossible to see under normal circumstances.

Also capturing attention, of course, is the building itself. Designed by Studio Gang, the building is curvaceous and flowing, or in architect-speak, it’s nonrectilinear. The west- facing exterior features glass windows peeking out from undulating smooth pink granite forms. The 80-foot-tall interior atrium lobby, evocative of a canyon, is made from a material that coats nearly every surface, applied in novel ways. Openings into exhibit spaces and bridges spanning the atrium are amorphous – no shape is repeated in the design. The finish is off-white, and although the primary material is concrete, the effect is organic, almost like looking at bone on a microscopic level, with its crevices and tendons stretching across the space. Read more here