A Modern Stone Age Fantasy

The American Museum of Natural History gets a swoopy-gritty addition.

- JUSTIN DAVIDSON

THE ARCHITECTURE FIRM Studio Gang grapples with the earth’s basic elements. Aqua Tower in Chicago ripples like the surface of Lake Michigan. The flame red-and-smoke-gray Rescue Company 2 in Brooklyn serves the Fire Department. The Solar Carve office building along the High Line dodges and twists to keep from blocking day-light. Now the team led by Jeanne Gang has embodied geological forces in the form of the granite-clad, cavelike Gilder Center, the High Flintstonian west wing of the American Museum of Natural History. It’s a stony portal to a rock hall of fame and a labyrinth of fossils, a gateway to the museum’s explorations of all that’s hidden in the soil. Like the schist outcrops that rear up nearby in Central Park, Gang’s mixture of urban attitude and immemorial forms reminds us that even a megalopolis like ours is just a collection of boxes clinging to a very old boulder. The building is far from faultless, but it is gloriously imperfect, frankly attention getting, and invigorating in its rejection of gloss and generic bigness. From now on, all young first-time visitors should enter from Columbus Avenue and have a chance to utter their first of many whoas even before crossing the threshold.