American Museum of Natural History opens new science center worth $465M

The facade of the Richard Gilder Center

 

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York has a transformative, grandiose new wing.

While much attention in recent years was focused on the institution’s main eastern entryway facing Central Park, where 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 $465 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, 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 revamps of the museum’s Halls of Gems and Minerals, and its Northwest Coast Hall.

The extension was designed by architecture firm Studio Gang

The center houses new exhibition and display areas devoted to insects, a restaurant, visible storage, a library, classrooms, laboratories and more. It includes a butterfly vivarium, where visitors can walk among hundreds of live specimens as they flutter about in a lush tropical setting. Another permanent fixture is an immersive and interactive video experience called “Invisible Worlds” that focuses on miniature and microscopic natural processes like firing brain neurons, the exchange of nutrients and water between tree roots and the importance of plankton to ocean ecosystems.

For the museum’s longtime leader Ellen Futter — now president emerita after stepping down earlier this year and being succeeded by Sean M. Decatur — the Gilder Center serves a key function at a moment when science has become increasingly politicized. “The goals 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. “This building is an antidote to misinformation and science denial.”