Biomorphique Fantastique

The morning after a pair of rave reviews in the Times and New York magazine brought the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation to the city’s notice, arts and culture journalists crowded on the multimodal stair that backstops the atrium, whose geological appearance has elicited a nauseating number of Flintstones references. By contrast, the mood of the press preview was determinedly edifying. “This is a monument and pillar to science, nature, and human cultures,” said Ellen V. Futter, the AMNH’s former director, of the $465 million addition. As an educational resource for combating the post-truth age, the Gilder Center allows for “a deepening of science” among the public, said architect Jeanne Gang. What this rhetoric, by turns soaring and probing, discounts—the same thing the swoopy atrium groks—is the latent plenitude of surfaces. By now, broadminded readers will have become acquainted with shotcrete and its curious, counterintuitive “materiality,” which elides distinctions between hard and fluid,…