NEW YORK -- On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a remarkable new museum has been fashioned from the simplest of geometrical forms.
Its exterior is a 12-story-high cube, with two outer walls made of colorless glass. Centered inside, as if it's floating on air, is a white aluminum sphere, 87 feet in diameter. The glass is so clear and the sphere is so large and luminous, especially at night, that it practically forces people to stop and look inside.
The building is the Rose Center for Earth and Science, a $210 million exploratorium that opens tomorrow as the latest addition to the American Museum of Natural History. The symbolism behind its design is as direct as its forms. The seemingly levitated sphere contains the new Hayden Planetarium, centerpiece of the addition. It also represents the universe of scientific information inside. And the gleaming glass cube is the window on that universe.
"It makes the science transparent, by de-bricking it if you will," explains museum president Ellen Futter. "It draws visitors to the building and makes them yearn to get inside the sphere and, by extension, into the cosmos. . . ."
Built to replace a 1930s-era planetarium that became outmoded over the years, the 330,500-square-foot Rose Center has been described as the most ambitious not-for-profit project to open in Manhattan since Lincoln Center was completed in the 1970s.
Larger than the largest museums in many cities, the Rose Center sets a new standard for planetariums by providing the most sophisticated virtual reality tour of the universe ever created. Its 20-minute Space Show -- presented inside a 429-seat theater that occupies the upper half of the "Hayden Sphere" -- is alone worth the trip.
But the significance of the Rose Center goes far beyond the star show, captivating as that may be. Working with the purest of forms, architects James Stewart Polshek and Todd Schliemann of the Polshek Partnership have created a rich composition that serves as a scientific icon for the museum and a bold new landmark for New York City.
Enduring forms
The sphere and the glass box are two of the most enduring forms in modern architecture, with examples ranging from Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes and Wallace Harrison's Perisphere for the 1939 World's Fair to Philip Johnson's Glass House and the crystalline office towers designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
