It’s pretty uncommon when a venerable, beloved establishment just like the American Museum of Pure Historical past in New York Metropolis undergoes a significant, multiyear growth that makes each critics and the general public completely happy.

By some means, that’s what Harvard Graduate Faculty of Design’s Jeanne Gang, one of many world’s main architects, managed to tug off on the museum’s new Richard Gilder Middle for Science, Training, and Innovation along with her structure and concrete design agency, Studio Gang.

The $465 million middle, which opened in Could, added six flooring and 230,000 sq. toes for brand spanking new exhibition galleries, lecture rooms, a library and theater, an insectarium, and a conservatory the place 1,000 butterflies fly freely. With a dramatic, canyon-like atrium that snakes upward and appears as if it was carved from historic river rock, the New York Occasions declared the Middle a “spectacular” instance of “poetic” public structure that was “destined to be an immediate heartthrob and colossal attraction.”

Gang’s colleague Gary Hilderbrand, the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Follow of Panorama Structure and chair of the division of panorama structure on the Design Faculty, and his agency Reed Hilderbrand, concurrently designed main enhancements to areas of the adjoining Theodore Roosevelt Park.

The Gazette spoke with Gang, a professor in observe of structure at Design Faculty, concerning the venture and the way local weather change is shaping her observe. Interview has been edited for readability and size.

GAZETTE: What have been the museum’s major targets for this venture and what have been the philosophies or concepts behind a number of the key design decisions you and your group made to perform these targets?

GANG: The American Museum of Pure Historical past has at all times been an academic establishment, not only for schoolchildren but additionally for adults and academics. They’ve a Ph.D. program, too. It’s virtually like a college, however for everybody of all ages. The museum needed to help and spotlight their academic mission in addition to the breadth of their experience.

A lot of the exhibitions and collections on show are targeted on a sure department of pure historical past, like dinosaurs, gems and minerals, or earth and house. That is the primary time they’ve constructed one thing that exhibits the extent of their collections, together with ones that they’ve by no means been capable of show earlier than, like bugs, and the way they’re used for scientific analysis. They actually needed to do one thing that may convey completely different points of their mission collectively, particularly on condition that science training within the U.S. ranks decrease than you’ll count on.

Along with new collections and exhibition areas, the Gilder Middle consists of a number of lecture rooms, studying laboratories, an expanded analysis library, and an immersive theater expertise.