Best things to do in New York
Forget the Empire State Building, MoMA and The Met. This new building is the Big Apple’s No. 1 must-see.
If you’re looking for the meaning of life you can find it on the Upper West Side of New York’s Central Park. It’s in a cave at the back of the American Museum of Natural History. This $US465m ($710m) sprayed concrete, or shotcrete, structure opened last month and resembles, depending on your point of view, a Yucatan cenote, Barbapapa’s house or Antoni Gaudi’s La Pedrera.
The cave is officially called the Richard Gilder Centre for Science, Education and Innovation. That’s neither the snappiest nor the most memorable name but, in a city where the arts and sciences are privately funded, such concessions are unavoidable. Billionaire donors in pursuit of legacy need their egos fondled, so everything from the exhibition halls to the loos seems to be dedicated to a Domestos P. Undercracker III or some such, although the nameplates, it’s rumoured, can be easily removed in case it emerges that the philanthropy is funded by historic misanthropy.
Inside, it’s a cathedral-like vault, asymmetrical and six storeys high, with bridges like ledges, what appear to be stalactites supporting the upper floors, and sunlight pouring through the holes in the roof. It’s instantly intriguing, and that’s exactly the effect architect Jeanne Gang set out to achieve.
“Geological landscapes feed our sense of adventure,” she says. “Canyons and caverns fuel curiosity. They make us want to explore, to see what lies around the bend.”
Theme parks are good at faking nature too, but Gang is a true believer. “Looking at the extent of humanity’s self-inflicted wounds, it’s more critical than ever to ask ourselves how architecture can respond,” she wrote in 2020. “How might we leverage this creative profession to build a more balanced and thriving planet?”
The Gilder is now the most important attraction in New York. The Empire State Building? Tall tourist trap. MoMA? A 5th Avenue distraction for box-tickers. The Met? Once magnificent but now so painfully right-on that Rothko is described as Latvian rather than Russian.
So make the Gilder your first stop and the magnificent AMNH, which you may remember from Ben Stiller’s 2006 film Night at the Museum, your second. The complex was built in 1874, when the world beyond New York City was wild, boundless and seemingly eternal. Tens of thousands of animals, birds, insects and fish were shot or trapped, then stuffed or pickled, to populate the museum’s magnificent dioramas, or to be picked apart by scientists. The culling of the few served, it was said, to better understand and protect the many. And there were so, so many.
The future, though, isn’t as bright as it used to be. In 2019 a landmark report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warned that about one million species were at risk of extinction. Last October, the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report revealed that monitored populations of vertebrates had declined 69 per cent since 1970, and in February the conservation data analysts NatureServe said 40 per cent of animals and 34 per cent of plants in the US were at risk of extinction, with 41 per cent of ecosystems facing collapse.
This means facilities established for the celebration of nature are now forced to focus on conservation and switch from natural history to natural future. That’s the Gilder’s mission. There’s the 464sq m Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium with giant cockroaches and an insect orchestra; a giant model of a honeycomb with bees as big as Jack Russells; a vast adventure playground for half a million leafcutter ants; and a magical butterfly vivarium you have to enter through an airlock.
Kids will run ahead, returning breathless to drag you to the next wonder, which will be a shame because parents will want to linger – 55 minutes flew by for me in the butterfly house. Regardless of age, though, the message is the same: all species matter and we can’t live without them.
Elsewhere, the glass walls of the Louis V. Gerstner Jr Collections Core hold selections from the four million specimens in the archive, ranging from Hirst-like critters in formaldehyde and the pinned moths collected by Nabokov – yes, that one – to the notebooks of the explorers who brought back the exhibits. It’s laid out like art, but in truth it’s evidence. And then there’s the meaning of life, but we’ll come to that later.
“We can’t abandon history,” says Ellen Futter, the outgoing president of the American Museum of Natural History. “We use our understanding of the past to better appreciate what is happening in the present and then to look forward to what might happen in the future, and people are worried about that future.”
Futter is retiring, having achieved her ambition of creating a bulwark against “the denial of science” in what she describes as a “post-truth world”.
“The younger generations really appreciate what’s at stake and want to make sure it’s still there for their children and their grandchildren, but we all yearn for places we can trust,” she says. “Because the museum is apolitical it is trusted, and because it’s positioned at the intersection of science and society it can present the facts to people in ways they can understand.”
I’m not sure the messaging is explicit enough about the challenges facing those who will inherit our world.
“We don’t ram facts down throats,” says Sean Decatur, the new president of the AMNH. He prefers the Gilder to have a calming effect. “People are beginning to panic. Listening to news reports about extreme weather, political instability, disruptions to food supplies and biodiversity loss has given many a sense of foreboding and impotence.
“Part of the museum’s mission is to show the evidence and the details to help people understand why this is happening and what can be done about it. The critical thing is that you leave here determined to ask more questions, engage more and understand how we might mitigate our impacts on the planet, both individually and collectively.”
Shame, then, that we have to go to New York, producing tonnes of CO2 for return flights. The Gilder won’t judge you for that, but it might make you rethink your future travel.
What’s left is the meaning of life. It’s not new. Darwin worked out that we were all related and Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis proposed that the planet, in effect, was a single, self-regulating system in which all entities – organic and non-organic – were essential for the maintenance of life on Earth.
Nowhere has the interconnectivity of life been made more dazzlingly clear than the Gilder’s Invisible Worlds exhibit. It looks like a theme park attraction; a queue space lined with screens and buttons that show how those ants and the cockroaches are our distant relations; how food webs work; and how much of life we’re missing because it’s too small, too fast or too slow to observe.
Then you reach the main event: a 360-degree immersive experience in which, in ultra-realistic animation, you are taken on a 12-minute journey from deep beneath the Brazilian rainforest to travel along the capillaries of roots, fly with migrating birds, walk in Central Park, hunt with dolphins and watch plankton light up as a blue whale swims through the room.
At the very least you’ll be mesmerised. At best you’ll realise, perhaps for the first time, that everything, everywhere is connected by a web of interdependence, that none of us will make it on our own, and that this planet is the only one we’ve got.
Chris Haslam was a guest of the American Museum of Natural History
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The American Museum of Natural History is open daily, 10am-5.30pm, except Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. Adults $US28 ($43); children $US16; concession $US22.
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