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, technical and accidental. As much as critics have swooned over the sculptural quality of the space, they have also drawn attention to the brittle residue of the shotcrete technique—developed in the early 20th century by taxidermist and one-time AMNH employee Carl Akeley—which intimates a kind of aestheticized decay; rub up against a wall or balcony and you’ll dislodge particulates of indeterminate matter. Beyond the frame lies something more mundane: drywall, and lots of it. Piercing the biomorphic veil delivers visitors into anonymous corridors that, at least when emptied of other people as it was on press day, are about as charmless as the dead space of shopping malls, where the retail thins out, save for the odd pretzel kiosk. To be fair, one expects these passageways will be bare only in the off-hours, precisely when the museum is most likely to host society gatherings. As NYRA contributor and sometime SKYLINE guest editor Michael Nicholas has ventured, with the Gilder Center, New York may have gained its premier party venue.