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The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation is the latest addition to New York’s historic American Museum of Natural History. At a time of urgent need for better public understanding of science and greater access to science education, the Gilder Center is designed to amplify the intellectual impact of the Museum with experiential architecture that encourages exploration—drawing in people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities to share the excitement of scientific discovery and learning about the natural world.
Natural form-making processes informed the architecture. Akin to a porous geologic formation shaped by the flow of wind and water, the building’s central, five-story atrium greets arriving visitors like an intriguing landscape, ready to be explored.
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The Gilder Center establishes a welcoming, fully accessible main entrance on Columbus Avenue. Significant improvements to adjacent portions of Theodore Roosevelt Park benefit museum visitors, pedestrians, and the local ecosystem. Improvements include a revitalized and enlarged lawn; new curvilinear paths that improve pedestrian circulation and make more of the park publicly accessible; 22 new canopy and understory trees, as well as notable canopy trees that were preserved; and new shrubs, groundcovers, and planted islands, creating a rich regional tapestry with seasonal interest. To moderate the impact of the building on the night sky and limit light pollution, exterior lighting and façade lighting fixtures are designed with full and partial cutoff and timed controls.
The Gilder Center’s verticality is key to lowering its overall energy demands, with the atrium bringing natural light and air circulation deep into the building’s interior. A high-performance envelope with stone cladding, along with deep-set windows and shade trees, help passively cool the building in summer. Together with a highly-efficient irrigation system and hearty native and adaptive vegetation that supports wildlife, the project’s environmental strategies allow the building itself to exhibit the depth of care for the natural world that is central to the Museum’s mission. The Gilder Center achieved LEED Gold certification.
Conceived from the inside-out, the design vastly improves functionality and visitor experience for the entire Museum campus. Providing new exhibition, education, collections, and research spaces, the Gilder Center also brings essential yet previously back-of-house functions into public view for the first time, giving visitors new insight into the full breadth of the Museum’s diverse collections and active scientific research.
Opening the building to natural daylight, the atrium structure provides intriguing views into different spaces while bridging physical connections between them. Its structural walls and arches carry the building’s gravity loads. It is constructed using shotcrete, a technique primarily used for infrastructure, which sprays structural concrete directly onto custom-bent rebar cages. Eliminating the waste of formwork, the technique achieves a visually and spatially continuous interior, whose form extends outward to greet the park and neighborhood beyond.
From the central atrium, visitors can easily find and flow into the surrounding program spaces—traversing bridges, moving along sculpted edges, and passing through vaulted openings. These spaces include an insectarium and butterfly vivarium; the five-story Collections Core, which houses more than 3 million scientific specimens; Invisible Worlds, an immersive experience; an expanded research library; and state-of-the-art classrooms, learning labs, and education areas.
“The Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation is a glorious new facility that fulfills a critical need at a critical time... This opening represents a milestone moment for the Museum in its ongoing efforts to improve science literacy while highlighting for our visitors everything the Museum has to offer, and sparking wonder and curiosity.” - Ellen Futter, President Emerita of the American Museum of Natural History
Founded and led by Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang is an architecture and urban design practice headquartered in Chicago with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Paris. Working as a collective of more than 130 architects, designers, and planners, we create innovative projects that bring about measurable positive change for their users, communities, and natural ecology—a mission we refer to as “actionable idealism.”
Studio Gang’s award-winning work ranges in scale and typology from the 101-story St. Regis Chicago tower, to a reimagined Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, and to the new 31-acre Tom Lee Park in Memphis. Studio Gang is currently engaged in cultural, civic, and mixed-use projects across the Americas and in Europe, including a new Center in Paris for the University of Chicago, a new United States Embassy in Brasilia, and the Global Terminal at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.
