The Cosmic Cathedral

Thirty years ago, the world held its breath as Apollo 11 commander Neil A. Armstrong climbed gingerly from a spindly spaceship to walk on the moon. Like millions of other people, architect James Stewart Polshek watched the flickering television images with a sense of awe.

“I ran outside to look at the moon,” he recalled. “I had the crazy sense I could see Armstrong. The sky was very clear.”

Fast-forward three decades.

Now gray-haired and prosperous, Polshek is being praised for farsightedness of a different sort as architect of the new Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.

It is a spectacular building, an 87-foot-diameter sphere set in a seven-level cube of special clear glass resting atop a one-story base of gray granite.

“I have come to think of this as a cosmic cathedral,” Polshek said, without a trace of bashfulness, standing at the base of the sphere, which rests on a tripod--like the lunar lander. “It will be attracting pilgrims for the sake of science and education.”

If the Rose Center is Polshek’s architectural moon shot, it is far more than a building.

The $210-million center is billed as the world’s most advanced planetarium, containing the largest and most powerful virtual-reality site in the world. Portions of it are science with a Hollywood veneer.

Jody Foster explains how the Big Bang formed the cosmos. Tom Hanks takes audiences in the planetarium’s 429-seat space theater on a journey to the edge of the universe with stars and planets modeled from the latest astronomical data into three-dimensional, high-definition images.

Catalogs of star clusters, interstellar gas clouds and galaxies were obtained from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Information on the luminosity and location of the 100,000 stars nearest to Earth came from the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos satellite.

Scientists and software engineers then indicated three-dimensionally the volume of objects within 100,000 light-year of Earth.

Visitors sit in seats like those in spaceships, feel the seats vibrate with a deep rumble as they lift off on a grand tour, passing the planets, soaring through the Milky Way, journeying a billion light-years before returning home through a black hole to Manhattan’s subways and traffic.

“We are citizens of the cosmos,” Hanks proclaims during the voyage.

The bottom half of the sphere is devoted to the Big Bang Theater. Visitors standing atop glass gather around an 8-foot-deep bowl to view laser and lighting effects that simulate the burst of energy and the images that marked the first moments of the universe.

“Welcome to the beginning of time,” says Foster. “ . . . Everything in our universe, out to the most distant galaxies, was once packed together in a volume smaller than a grain of sand. Thirteen billion years ago, that grain of pure energy burst open. Space itself exploded in cosmic fire.” Surrounding the sphere is a ramp that charts the 13 billion years of the universe and brings home how relatively puny is the duration of human history.

The ramp contains 220 astronomical images and 13 markers denoting the passage of each billion years. At eight points along the ramp, computers are set up to help visitors determine how large the universe was at that period. At the end of the 360-foot pathway the thickness of a human hair illustrates the relative duration of mankind’s history.

At the bottom level of the center is a permanent exhibition hall illustrating discoveries of modern astrophysics.

The task, simply put, was to pack a huge amount of abstract information into a palatable form for the public.

“This is a project first and foremost about science and education,” said Ellen V. Futter, the museum’s president. “It is architecture in the service of science.”

Futter faces a far more complex task at the planetarium than at Barnard College in Manhattan where she served as president for 13 years.

Unlike a college with strict admission standards where students enter with a body of knowledge gained in high school, the Rose Center will bring in visitors with varying educational backgrounds.

The challenge exhibit planners faced was to find a common denominator interesting enough to lure people to return. “It is not meant to be a one-gulp exercise,” Futter said.

“The architecture is a serious attempt to make a bridge between a very abstract science composed of highly abstract principles, basically mathematics, and a large, urban, diverse set of visitors that are at first going to find it incomprehensible,” said Polshek.

“The idea is to make it comfortable and exciting so they return again and again.”

Museum officials estimate that more than a million people a year will visit the Rose Center, which opened to the public Saturday.

In the past, the Museum of Natural History has been overshadowed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its neighbor across Central Park.

Though their responses are couched in diplomacy, Futter and other officials of the natural history museum hope the Rose Center--which replaces the old Hayden Planetarium--will change that.