Wonder and awe in the stunning new wing of Natural History.

When the plans for it first surfaced, I wondered if the Natural History Museum’s new Gilder Center might end up looking more culinary.

On the outside, a cliff of white and pink granite with gaping windows somewhat resembling cavernous openings, which embraces the Romanesque Museum’s impressive turn-of-the-century addition. Past the front doors, this sloping shelf turns. It turns into a lofty canyon-shaped atrium, a deep city block.

for architects, Jane Gang And her team, Gilder was clearly a gamble and a leap of faith, bucking the innocuous mores of the day, almost begging accusations of architectural indulgence.

Now that it’s built, I love it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to equate it with Gaudi’s brilliant genius or Saarinen’s brilliant TWA station, but she’s in the family. Like them, Gilder is stunning: a poetic, joyful, theatrical work of public architecture and a highly developed flight of sculptural imagination. New Yorkers live to protest the new buildings. It seems like this one is destined to be an instant heartthrob and a massive magnet.

And for a meaningful part of its user base, the part that hasn’t quite finished junior high, I expect it will be great, like a lot of other things in the museum.

It’s certainly a welcome change of subject from the statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the museum’s Central Park West entrance, which was a convenient and long-awaited target for protesters after the killing of George Floyd. Since 1940, Roosevelt has been sitting on his charger, chest distended, head held high, looming over two attendants, one Native American and one African, standing at his feet.

The museum finally secured the city’s permission to ship the statue to North Dakota last year. Among other things, it set the stage for the opening of Guilder.

Back in 2014, the museum first announced plans to add a 230,000-square-foot, Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. At the time, City Hall pledged $15 million for what was then Gilder’s budget of $325 million. The hope was that it would open by 2019, the museum’s 150th anniversary. It was the first major natural history addition since the Rose Center for Earth and Space’s stunning modernization–Polshek Partnership’s take on Étienne-Louis Bouley’s famous tribute to Newton in the form of a glass box containing a model of the solar system–which replaced the lovable-but-attractive one. Hayden Planetarium in 2000.

Gilder would require the demolition of several unloved structures in the back of the house. It included a little-used entrance on Columbus Avenue where the road dead ends west of 79th in a strip of green called Theodore Roosevelt Park.

The new wing would need customizable galleries for insects and a greenhouse for butterflies to be designed by Ralph Appelbaum, both of which are incredible. Five floors of storage will house some four million scientific specimens – three floors of which are with open exhibits visible through tall windows in the storage.

Gilder will also feature new classrooms, laboratories and a library, along with a stage shaped like a hockey rink and roughly the same size, for a state-of-the-art interactive show about the interconnectedness of all life on Earth.

To house it all, the Ganges Valley, like an atrium, flows outward into the garden to define the stone façade. Together they will make Gilder look as colossal as a Gothic cathedral. After making expeditions across the American West, the architect began modeling the layers of frozen rock by sculpting ice.

All those wrinkles and suggestive curves also evoke stretched hamstrings and tendons.

Skeptics wondered if the whole thing wasn’t just an elaborate excuse to build a grand new ceremonial space for the museum’s fundraisers. The atrium will inevitably function in this manner. But Gilder needed to be large because it was designed to connect the disjointed outlying parts of the museum.

Natural History evolved from the cross-and-square design pioneered by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould in the 1870s. Over many years, as it grew into one of the city’s tent institutions, the museum grouped some two dozen buildings in various historical styles, increasingly patched together like a mad quilt.

For regulars, the former dead-end galleries, such as those for gems and minerals, were like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley: secret, magical places. But for millions of visitors, the museum can be a frustrating maze, representing a fiasco.

Gilder certainly doesn’t solve the whole problem. But some of the more clever and sophisticated work by Studio Gang helps streamline visitor flow and make intuitive internal connections so people can focus more on groups, rather than guidance.

Delays plagued the project. Since 2014, its 150th anniversary has come and gone. Richard Gilder, the banker and philanthropist who set up the funding for the new wing, died in 2020. The budget rose to $465 million as construction costs soared during the pandemic. The city’s contribution has grown to $92 million. Natural History’s wise chief Ellen Futter, who led Rose and Gilder Center’s expansions, retired in March.

The pandemic was only partly the problem. The project also faced headwinds from neighbors who raised legal challenges based on Gilder’s incursion into a corner of the park. In 2019, the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court finally eviction The last challenge.

Ongoing negotiations with neighbors ended in reducing the center’s footprint in the park. Natural History also hired Reed Hilderbrand, a landscape architecture firm, to preserve some trees that, in early expansion plans, would have likely been cut down, and to add more benches.

I suppose this is a legitimate argument for the public benefits of all those costly years of sometimes harsh community involvement. I frequented the old stretch of park where guilders now rose, which was nice. It seems that the new garden, whose plantings are still in progress, will be more generous and generous, and will open green spaces that were previously closed.

Gilder himself should take museum visitors back to his roots in the concept of admiration. Back in the mid-1800s, before natural history even existed, the PT Barnum American Museum in Lower Manhattan was the most popular museum in the city. Over the course of two decades, more visitors reportedly paid the 25-cent entrance fee than people in the United States.

They went into a digital diorama and were impressed by ventriloquists, glassblowers, and a band of 200 “educated” white rats. They thought of a mummified monkey’s head sewn onto a salmon’s tail—it was called a Fiji mermaid—and saw performances by then-pop stars like Tom Thumb and Ned the Learned Seal, a marine mammal who played the hand organ.

“Why can’t we now have a great folk museum in New York without any ‘bullshit’ about it?” The New York Times asked him after the Barnum Museum burned down in 1868. City leaders agreed.

And from the ashes of Barnum’s delightful mansion has risen the American Museum of Natural History, which has preserved, crucially, an essential piece of Barnum’s DNA.

Like Barnum’s attic of curiosities and entertainments, Natural History hails from the “cabinets of wonder” that began to proliferate in Europe during the sixteenth century: diverse collections of everything that was greatest, smallest, rarest, most wonderful or baffling. This was an age of global exploration, colonial conquest, human curiosity, and scientific advancement. Wonder was a desirable middle ground between delight and education, proving God’s mystical prowess.

But then the Enlightenment arrived as a second-grade teacher replaced her overburdened surrogate, and tipped the scales toward sober instruction. The wonder was, as Descartes warned, “the perverted use of reason.” By the 19th century, the reservoirs of wonder were succumbing to what we now think of as a modern encyclopedic museum.

The American Museum of Natural History has become exhibit A for such an institution—imperialist and ferocious, preying on exotic animals and cultural artifacts in the name of science and scholarship. But visitors still go there to be amazed by the dinosaur bones and dioramas.

I was once inside the famous gorilla diorama, which reproduces the Central African landscape where naturalist and inventor Carl Akeley, the “father of modern taxidermy,” is buried. His death there made front-page news in 1926. He killed Akeley, restored the gorilla and installed it in the diorama. Years earlier, he had installed Jumbo, the famous elephant, for Barnum.

I digressed to Akeley because he came up with a still widely used building process called “shotcrete,” which involves spraying concrete onto rebar fittings and metal grating, then carving or troweling the wet concrete by hand.

Ganges Valley made of shotcrete in Akele.

Computer programs helped devise the parametric curves in the valley. The bandeau smoothed wrinkles and folds. Design firm Arup handled the structural engineering, ensuring that the entire structure, like Jumbo in a Twister game, supported itself (and its visitors) on just a few compact columns underground.

I’m reminded of a project Jang did a decade ago, just before Gilder started: a small social justice center at Kalamazoo College in Michigan that includes concave facades with cordwood masonry and casement windows. Its construction also depended on the collaboration of the architect with the workers who were called on to be creative and do their best.

What Gilder produces is an architecture almost in the vein of a Richard Serra sculpture, emphasizing its mass and significance. Shotcrete has a texture like sandpaper. The façade is not thin veneer or glass but polished pink Milford stone ground in the same granite quarry John Russell Pope used in the 1930s to design the museum’s gleaming West Facade in Central Park.

All of these tactile surfaces make even more apparent, by contrast, the ethereal role light plays in the building: Gilder, unlike most museums, is filled with ornate, bird-friendly windows looking out over the city. Rough surfaces also play up details like polished oak bars and a bean-shaped staircase (I’m not surprised Jang admired the great Japanese architect Toyo Ito) that culminates in the library, which overlooks Theodore Roosevelt Park.

Jang decorated the single column of the library to resemble the torso of an oversized mushroom, with ribbon lights and ash panels branching along the ceiling for its gills. Those lights shine through the trees in the park during the evening, when the Gilder façade—which combines the museum’s eclectic architecture along Columbus Avenue so beautifully—turns toward reds and grays.

Over the years, I’ve watched architects’ eyes roll at the mention of Ganges Valley. I’ve heard rumblings that, in light of climate change, shotcrete isn’t the most sustainable material for a museum whose primary themes are the sacredness of nature and the honesty of science.

But then it turns out that many of the buildings that are greener are the ones that last longer because they are still used and loved. I may have come from a narrow-minded place, because I grew up visiting Natural History and watched my kids grow up there. Even today I find myself returning from yet another encounter with a giant squid model or a narcissistic diorama feeling something I feel now as I wander the galleries of Gilder’s Cave, gazing at the sun pouring in through transoms and rosette windows.

It’s more than just the pleasure that comes from allowing one’s disbelief to be briefly suspended before returning to the streets and everyday life.

I guess I’d call it a wonder.