The World Under Glass

For decades, New Yorkers have been drawn to the American Museum of Natural History as much for its musty, nostalgic charm as for its remarkable collections of obscure species and exhibits on human evolution. Its dark rooms of life-like dioramas--from reconstructions of a foraging cave family to an embalmed gorilla in its mountain habitat--conjure a Victorian era of specimen jars and butterfly nets.

The Rose Center for Earth and Space brings that image into the present with a bang. The museum’s original domed Hayden Planetarium--a ‘30s-era Art Deco structure that was ripped out to make room for the new--is already a distant memory. In its place is an enormous shimmering sphere trapped inside a nine-story-tall glass cube. Designed by the New York-based Polshek Partnership, the $210-million center, which opened Feb. 19, houses a wide range of exhibits on the origins of the universe. The design’s pure, geometric forms--bathed in light during the day and glowing eerily at night--make for a powerful allegory of science’s ongoing struggle to make sense of the world.

In fact, what Polshek’s design does is replace nostalgic sentimentality with a keen sense of history. The design was inspired by Etienne-Louis Boullee’s 1785 proposal for a cenotaph for Isaac Newton--a gargantuan stone orb pierced by tiny beams of light that was meant as an idealized model of Divine Order. And the Rose Center’s strong geometric forms evoke that Enlightenment belief in the existence of an underlying cosmic symmetry.

But unlike Boullee’s stone fantasy, the glass facade of Polshek’s cube suggests a fragile world, one where knowledge is not entirely stable. The building is animated by a powerful architectural narrative, one where each step in a carefully drawn sequence presents a different perspective on a central story. Knowledge is presented as a process, never an absolute.

Visitors approach the center through a narrow park that runs along the museum’s 81st Street edge. Seen from there, the sphere seems to float like a giant balloon inside its glass cage, the whole apparatus comfortably nestling up against two intersecting wings of the old museum. There are no superficial efforts to conform to the museum’s original Beaux Arts style. Instead, the center is a confident statement about its own age. Its well-proportioned frame stands comfortably detached, neither overwhelming the old building nor deferring to it.

Once you enter the lobby, however, that overall view disappears, and you encounter the building’s central narrative. The lobby is set just below the sphere’s equator, and the giant ball looms dramatically in front of you, propped up on three massive V-shaped braces. A ramp wraps around the base of the sphere, cantilevered from a series of smaller braces that add to the building’s structural muscularity. The effect is powerful: The bulging sphere displaces the center of the room that you would expect to occupy, setting you in immediate orbit around it.

That sense of a world in perpetual motion continues as you travel deeper into the building. A grand entry stair leads to the lower level, which contains a range of exhibits and interactive displays on the nature of the universe. Standing among these exhibits, with the globe propped up directly above, the building can evoke a ‘60s-era Space Age fantasy. Bridges cross overhead, three glass elevators rise 90 feet up into the air and slowly descend back down again. Rows of vertical steel trusses brace the cube’s enormous glass walls. Model planets--suspended on wires around the central sphere--are the one unfortunate moment of kitsch.

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The main event, of course, is above. The elevators propel visitors up along the back of the cube before depositing them near a bridge at equator level. The bridge punches through one side of the sphere, leading into its dark belly, where the Space Theater provides a virtual trip through the cosmos. But the architectural voyage is equally compelling. The slow sequence of crossing underneath the sphere, rising up its side and crossing the bridge creates a wonderful feeling of suspension. By the time you enter the theater, you are already floating on air.

After the show, visitors exit onto the long, 300-foot ramp that winds down around the sphere’s exterior. The ramp traces the history of the universe as most scientists now perceive it, from its inception 13 billion years ago with the Big Bang to the present. A series of displays, arranged along the rail, can be fine-tuned as scientists refine their theoretical timeline. The duration of human life is represented by the width of a single human hair.

But New York’s architectural history is also a key part of the narrative. From the ramp, the view of the surrounding cityscape--with its elegant prewar apartment buildings and modern brick towers--is as dramatic as the spectacle inside. The effect is to juxtapose, conceptually at least, an almost incomprehensible shift in scales, from the infinite expanse of the universe to the drama of the urban experience and solitary human life.

It has been a long time since a building has tried to tackle such vast themes in such a loaded cultural context in Manhattan. Architecture lovers here have struggled for decades to resurrect a creative legacy that has long seemed dormant, if not dead. Not so long ago, the construction of Michael Graves’ ghastly Postmodern addition to Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum was a real possibility. (Thankfully, the building, a collage of overblown classical forms, was never built.) Completed in 1992, Charles Gwathmey’s addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Guggenheim Museum was more subdued, but its neutral stone facade nonetheless reflected the city’s reluctance to wholeheartedly embrace an architecture of our era. The best one can say about it is that it melts unobtrusively into the background.

In the context of such dubious achievements, the Rose Center should be taken as a valuable lesson: Even in the dense historical fabric of Manhattan, genuinely inventive architecture can flourish, given the chance.