New York National Museum opens gilder Center

While much attention in recent times was focused on the institution's main eastern entranceway facing Central Park, debate raged over the fate of a controversial statue of Theodore Roosevelt - it was removed in early 2022 - the institution has been planning and building the $2.5 million, 230,000-square-foot Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation on its western, Columbus Avenue side for nearly a decade.

The new complex, the Gilder Center for short, was opened to the public earlier this month. It adds a dramatic new entryway and gathering place to the AMNH's sprawling campus and goes some way to solving its tangled network of wings and corridors, connecting to half of the museum's 20 buildings in 33 different places. It follows recent renovations of the museum's Halls of Gems and Minerals and its Northwest Coast Hall.

The center has new exhibitions and display areas dedicated to insects, a restaurant, visible storage, a library, classrooms, laboratories and more. It features a butterfly vivarium, where visitors can walk among hundreds of live species while they flutter about in a lush tropical environment. Invisible Worlds is another immersive and interactive video experience that explores miniature and microscopic natural processes like fire brain neurons, the exchange of nutrients and water between tree roots, and the importance of plankton to ocean ecosystems.

The Gilder Center, which is home to the museum's longtime leader, Ellen Futter - now president emerita after stepping down earlier this year and being succeeded by Sean M. Decatur - serves a crucial role in a changing world where science has become increasingly politicized. The objectives of this building were intensified and made all the more urgent by the pandemic and the emergence of a post-truth world, Futter said at a press conference. An antidote to denial and misinformation, this building is an antidote to misinformation and science denial. The center achieves this in part by establishing a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world, which some of the museum's older exhibits and classical rooms arguably can t quite conjure. The Gilder Center, a project designed by Chicago-based architecture firm Studio Gang, also completed a connecting expansion of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, looks sleek and unobtrusive enough from the outside, perhaps due in part to opposition from preservationists after the project was first announced in 2014.

We wanted the building to offer and open up an invitation, bring new levels of visibility into the museum and be as visible and accessible as possible, said Jeanne Gang, the founder and chief executive of Studio Gang. She described the center as an innie building that welcomes visitors inward, rather than projecting outward. It was conceived as if it had been carved from a solid block. With its five-story atrium, with its dramatic skylights and seamless rounded concrete surfaces, visitors can access the river-carved canyons in the desert Southwest, or perhaps underwater to a tropical coral reef. The soaring area boasts sweeping shapes and stunning suspended walkways. It's a stunning addition to both the AMNH campus and the public-facing architecture of New York City, both of which have nothing quite like it.