American Museum of Natural History Inaugurates the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation in New York

By Javier Otazu |

New York (EFE).- The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) inaugurated this week the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation in its west wing, a spectacular concrete building full of curved lines and called to become one of the architectural landmarks of New York.

The building, which rises six stories above the ground, faces Columbus Avenue and is 21,000 square feet, cost 465 million dollars and began construction in 2014, but the coronavirus pandemic forced its opening to be delayed several times.

Inspired by caves and canyons

The entire structure of the new wing has been made of crude white shotcrete, and is the work of the architect Jeanne Gang, who explained in her presentation that she wanted to promote through skylights and large windows of various shapes without a single straight line “the circulation of air and light”, and which also took into account the axis of the sun to evoke the solar system as much as possible.

Gang said he was inspired “by the caves and canyons” of the American Southwest, as well as the way ice and warm water have capriciously shaped rocks in many places.

With this, he has drawn the lines of the different spaces with two main purposes: to create a natural connection with Manhattan and to facilitate circulation to all the spaces of the museum, one of the most popular in New York and in the world, with close to 5 million annual visits.

“We wanted to create spaces that inspire curiosity and invite exploration,” said Gang, “and that the center be an invitation to get to know our natural world and the incredible collections that the museum treasures,” famous mainly for its planetarium, its collection of fossils from dinosaurs and their diversity of stuffed animals.

Insects, butterflies and immersive reality

The Richard Gilder consists of several rooms that become the most modern in the natural history museum world: an “insectarium” where ants roam freely in the middle of the task of transporting food, bees, beetles of all sizes or silkworms. dedicated to their work.

This room tries to break with “the bad reputation that insects carry”, said David Grimaldi, one of its managers, when the truth is that 99% are harmless (they neither bite nor transmit diseases) and essential in nature.

But what will undoubtedly become the star room is that of the butterflies: 600 specimens of 80 different species, from Asia, America and Africa, today flew inside a tropical microspace, filling it with all colours. Several strategically placed giant magnifying glasses allow you to see them at the time of drinking fruits made available to you.

In a totally different register, another of the new spaces is a 360-degree immersive reality room, where visitors can feel like they are navigating on the seabed or through the air and can virtually step on puddles of water or handfuls of plankton and scatter them. in the space.

A museum “against denialism and post-truth”

There was no shortage of ideological messages in a museum that has joined the “woke” culture of New York in recent years, and the now emeritus president, Ellen Futter, who left the effective direction of the center just a few months ago, made clear the missions that the museum assumes: cultural understanding, the protection of biodiversity and the fight against the climate crisis, he said.

“There is a huge need for understanding to combat misinformation and science denialism,” said Futter, who insisted that “in the post-truth world” it becomes more important than ever to “trust science and understand that everything is interconnected.” .

And certainly, the new center insists on that main idea in all its rooms: that the world in which we live is one and that all of us -human beings, animals and plants- are much more interconnected than we think.