The smallest and the largest come together here. Ants, 500,000 in all, are crawling on a glass bridge above the new wing of the New York Museum of Natural History. And along the walls, equally gigantic whales swim on immersive giant screens.
From the outside the building looks modern, with mirrored glass panes and a hint of honeycombs – inside there are actually huge honeycombs hanging, and the architecture is also reminiscent of a beehive created by the set designers of the “Star Wars” desert planet Tatooine. Loamy, round bulges dominate the scenery, it is a kind of tunnel system through which you move.
A hodgepodge of evidence
The museum is intended to be one thing above all else, its scientific director Cheryl Hayashi told the press ahead of Thursday’s opening: a display space for the evidence of science. She speaks of the “collection core” – a sheer mass of objects that will now be on display here from the four million piece collection of the Natural History Museum.
Among them are exhibits as diverse as megalodon basking shark teeth, Mayan bricks and spools of spider silk. Most of it is presented behind glass windows.
Inspiration for protecting the planet
Everything is connected to everything else – this is what the new exhibition area is intended to show: “Through the DNA you are connected to all life on earth,” it says, for example. An interactive show shows how interdependent this life is. Zoom in – you can see proteins in human DNA and the neural network of the brain. Zoom out – and you see New York from above. According to museum director Sean Decatur, the Gilder Center aims to show what the connection between them is: the scientific process.
Making the scientific process visible and showing what evidence it provides – all of this serves a vision, after all, said the retired director of the Natural History Museum, who built the Gilder Center, Ellenfutter: “That’s the vision: our visitors to one to provide a deeper understanding of the world; to perceive how everything is connected to everything else; to trust science; and finally to be inspired to protect our precious planet.”
High praise from the “New York Times”
But the real star is the building. The New York Times praised the building, which was financed with public funds and donations, as “spectacular”: “A poetic, cheerful, theatrical work of public architecture and a highly sophisticated sculptural fantasy.”
The planning and construction of the approximately 22,000 square meter extension, which cost around 465 million dollars (about 420 million euros), took almost ten years. The CoV pandemic, among other things, caused numerous delays. Officially dubbed the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, the addition nestles within the multi-block museum, which is made up of many other buildings.
Publikumshit in New York
On the one hand, it offers space for exhibitions, rooms for learning and research, archive storage space and a restaurant – and on the other hand it is intended to simplify, regulate and better distribute the flow of visitors through the entire museum. Because the Natural History Museum is one of the most popular attractions in New York and was always so overcrowded with several million visitors a year that the extension had become necessary.
It will be a “great pleasure” to welcome visitors to the new building, said Director Decatur, who has just become the first black man to take over the management of the museum – succeeding Futter, who for around 30 years was the first woman to head the institution had stood.
