Studio Gang designs sculpted science center for the American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History decided on Studio Gang Architects’ design for the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The New York City museum’s new building will have both scientific facilities and public exhibition space.

Jeanne Gang designed the Central Exhibition Hall to connect directly to the center of the museum through a spatial gallery. Along the route will be laboratories, visualization theaters, imaging facilities, and classrooms, along with museum exhibitions. The hall’s exterior will be covered in glass and stone.

The hall will hold areas where visitors can engage with high-tech tools, such as gene mapping, 3D imaging, and big data assimilation and visualization, all to learn about the current state of scientific research.

Also in the plans are a museum library, an insect hall, an interpretive wall, several floors displaying the museum’s collections, and the Invisible Worlds Theater. The theater will show, via new imaging technology, the strides being made in research of things big (the depths of the ocean, for instance) and small (the human microbial ecosystem).

The entire project, which comes out to 218,000 sf, is expected to cost $325 million, and half of that money has been raised. Construction is expected to begin in 2017, and the goal is to open in 2020.