Hall of Science Expanding in Queens

[Kris]

Hall of Science Expanding in Queens

With Bovis Lend Lease LMB Inc. serving as general contractor, the 55,000-sq.-ft. extension to the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadow Park in Queens is well under way.

The $68 million addition designed by Polshek Partnership Architects LLP, provides a long, low horizontal transparent counterpoint to the museum's original building designed by Harrison and Abramovitz for the 1964 World's Fair which consists of a cellular concrete frame infilled with dark cobalt-colored glass shards.

The extension's exposed structural steel frame will provide visitors with a visual demonstration of structural principles. Cladding the steel structure is a taut, luminous, uniform membrane of translucent panels, though which the building's internal mechanical systems will be revealed.

Work began in October 2001 and is expected to be completed by mid-2004.

http://newyork.construction.com

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[Kris]

Another interesting project in the same park is the Queens Museum of Art (http://www.ericowenmoss.com/QMA/montage.htm), which however seems on hold and uncertain.

[TLOZ Link5]

Both of them sound great. *Thanks for the information, Christian.

[billyblancoNYC]

Good. Always thought this was an overlooked museum in NYC. *Maybe it'll find more prominence now. I'm gald it's a go. *It's been talked about for a while. *Maybe they'll be a miracle for QMA and FMCP will get 2 nice new museum additions.

[Kris]

Queens Museum of Art Expansion (http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=2516)


October 3, 2003

The Final Frontier: Queens Museum's Rockets Return After a Tuneup in Ohio

By COREY KILGANNON

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Rockets were put up at the New York Hall of Science in Queens Thursday.

You can see a lot of strange things on a New York City street, but on Wednesday night there was something almost literally out of this world.

Two extra-long flatbed trucks rumbled into Manhattan looking as if they had made a wrong turn at Cape Canaveral. Each truck carried a vintage rocket built four decades ago to soar into space, a voyage that some days seems less difficult than trip across Midtown Manhattan.

The rockets — an Atlas and a Titan 2, each roughly 100 feet long — had been refurbished in Ohio and were being brought back to be reinstalled outside the New York Hall of Science, on the western edge of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

Getting there required taking a lengthy and windy route through Manhattan and Brooklyn.

"Oh, New York was definitely the roughest part of the two-day trip," said Frank Corsaro, 47, who drove the truck carrying the Titan. "We had traffic and cabbies cutting us off. People were actually stopping us asking if these were nuclear missiles for the war. It was ridiculous."

The rockets were first installed at the Hall of Science as an exhibit in the United States Space Park for the 1964 World's Fair, and eventually became a prime attraction of the Hall of Science.

But over the years they became decrepit, filthy and infested with pigeons. By the 1990's, they were more faded kitsch than gleaming majestic testaments to the boldness of the space age.

Their frameworks had deteriorated and the rockets were structurally unsound, said the Hall of Science's director, Alan J. Friedman.

The two rockets, which are essentially empty shells without their fuel tanks, are supported by internal frames for exhibition. "The Atlas actually had a wooden interior frame that had become infested with termites," he said. "We considered donating them to an aviation museum, but the people of New York have such an affection for the rockets, we realized that couldn't happen."

In 2001, they were removed and trucked to Akron, Ohio, for a $2 million restoration job by Thomarios, a specialty construction company. Workers built and installed new frames and foundations so the rockets would no longer need wires for support and could withstand winds up to 125 miles per hour.

Workers also replaced many exterior panels on the spacecraft and power-washed them before applying paint and coating to protect them.

Both rockets were made for the Air Force in 1961 to carry nuclear warheads, said Louis Chinal, a space historian from Staten Island who was hired as a consultant on the project. Instead, NASA acquired them to put astronauts into orbit under the Mercury and Gemini space programs. They were never used and ended up being donated for display at the World's Fair.

The Titan rocket has a mock fiberglass flight capsule, but the Atlas rocket was equipped by NASA with an original Mercury flight capsule used atop another rocket in a short unmanned flight in 1960 in Virginia to test an escape mechanism. During the recent refurbishment, that capsule was removed for display at the center, and a fiberglass replica has replaced it on the rocket.

Dr. Friedman called the rockets "a visual symbol of science and technology."

"They bring back for another generation the excitement a lot of us felt for the space program," he said. "These have always grabbed the attention of children and adults whose greatest dream is to blast off to another universe. They are visible and visceral and proof that science can be big and beautiful and even dangerous."

The rockets were reinstalled yesterday in their familiar spot next to the center. A crane lifted both rockets, now strengthened and shiny, off the flatbeds and onto sturdy new bases.

The Atlas, 93 feet of stainless steel, was guided onto its 10-foot-high platform as a group of onlookers in lawn chairs cheered. Then the Titan, with its new black, white and gray paint job, was installed.

"They're back, the twin towers of Queens," said Bob Lantier, 50, who lives near the center. "I grew up with these rockets. They're like family. I missed them every day they were away."

The Hall of Science is undergoing a $68 million, five-year expansion. As the crane lifted the Titan near the center's new 55,000-square-foot addition yesterday, gusts of wind made the rocket swing back and forth.

The scene inspired awe in Jonas Toleikis, 6, a first grader from Manhattan who mused that the rockets could take him "to outer space to see stars and stuff."

Elijah Wood, 7, a second grader from Port Washington, N.Y., said the experience made him want to become an astronaut.

His mother, Laura Kaye, 45, said she brought him because "my father brought me here when I was his age, and I wanted to give my son the same thing."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

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[Kris]

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[Kris]

Science in a magical space

Architect Todd Schliemann covers all the angles while shedding light with his Japanese-inspired addition to the New York Hall of Science

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

November 22, 2004

In 1964, when the World's Fair came to Queens, America was gazing straight up - at the moon, at outer space, at ambitions bounded only by the Milky Way. In Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, that quaint future has been preserved and refurbished. A pair of space age rockets, freshly polished and newly installed, stands at attention outside the New York Hall of Science, noses pointed toward the stratosphere.

But verticality has lost some of its cachet. The moon conquest is old news, President George W. Bush's proposal to send a team to Mars was met with muted enthusiasm, and the future feels as though it is best approached aslant.

Accordingly, the newest extension of the hands-on teaching museum, a 55,000-square- foot exhibition hall designed by Todd Schliemann of Polshek Partnership Architects that opens Thursday, shoots off at all sorts of angles. The roof line dips, the walls lean, the ceiling folds and staircases whirl and curve. Seen through the window at the glass-tipped end of the wing, it's the rockets that look wrong, their cockeyed uprightness at odds with the building's judicious tilt.

Schliemann also designed the Rose Center for Earth and Space, the great, luminous, toylike ball-in-a-box at the American Museum of Natural History, and the Hall of Science evidently fired the same playful instincts. But where the Rose Center amplified the most fundamental geometries to the point where they began to look cosmic, this new, much smaller structure is about the play between the obvious and the illusory.

Like a magician's palm, Schliemann's surfaces hide nothing but still fool the eye. Made of Kalwall, a synthetic wool sandwiched between thin fiberglass boards, the walls and roof are stiff but seem no more substantial than a flimsy window shade. They let in the same buttery kind of all-over light, making the room feel simultaneously cozy and spacious. At night, when the indoor lamps come on, the low-slung slab becomes a beacon, potentially attracting the notice of a passing airliner with its skyward strip of brightness.

Like '60s science fiction

If the building is a body, the Kalwall is an insulated, translucent skin. Inside, the skeleton is laid bare - a set of slender steel ribs held together by ligaments of cable. Every working part is out in the open, and every component has a personality. Air flows in, not through hidden vents, but through breathing steel pillars with circular grilles that give them a resemblance to robot faces out of a 1960s science-fiction movie.

But those seemingly self-explanatory walls don't behave the way walls are supposed to behave. Each one is taller at one end than at the other, for example, and they slope in opposite directions, discombobulating one's sense of perspective.

To a person standing at one end of the hall, one side looks longer than it is, receding into an impossible distance, while the other appears unnaturally short. To bridge this jaunty symmetry, the roof divides into two tilted triangular planes, joined by a long diagonal beam that doesn't look level, but is. Oh, yes, and the walls tilt out.

Words make it all sound more complicated than it is: I demonstrated the structure to my 7-year-old son at a restaurant table by folding paper napkins. Indeed, the new wing has the clever, sturdy delicacy of origami, an impression reinforced by the rice-papery appearance of the ceiling and walls.

How serendipitous that the opening of this Japanese-inspired addition by a local architect should come just two days after the inauguration of the new Museum of Modern Art, designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi to harmonize with the corporate modernism of midtown Manhattan. The Tokyo-New York feedback loop hums.

So does the conversation with history. Schliemann's feather-light wing branches off from the 1964 original by Wallace K. Harrison, a windowless octagon dug out of the ground and supported by a massive central pillar. The plan recalls the octagonal chapter house of the Gothic cathedral in Wells, England, a light-suffused room, in the center of which a thick column gathers slender vaults into a stone bouquet.

But while the architects of the chapter house treated sunshine as rays of revelation, Harrison's concrete folly made a virtue of paranoia, since the exhibit hall at least appeared brawny enough to survive a Russian ICBM.

Above this dungeon filled with merry children and exhibits that click and whirr rises Harrison's cathedral, one of the most breathtaking interiors in New York. From outside, the undulating concrete form looks fortress-like and bleak, but walk into the Great Hall on a sunny day and with the electric lights off, and you find yourself in a huge, blackened shaft studded with glimmering glass stained a dozen shades of blue: royal, midnight, lapis, azure, aqua, and so on. Nothing supports the walls except their own corrugation, which makes darkness itself feel structural.

Expressive engineering

In the new extension, Schliemann has rejected Harrison's heaviness, but he has embraced his predecessor's concerns with expressive engineering and glowing walls. He answers the bunker's bulk with papery weightlessness, and matches the nocturnal majesty of the Great Hall with a cocoon awash in light. True contextual architecture has nothing to do with dogged imitation, but depends on freedom grounded in analysis.

It's never easy to know what children feel about an environment they spend the afternoon abusing, but they cannot miss the more obviously seductive details like the saffron-painted walls or the railings made from bent sheets of Swiss-cheese steel with holes just big enough to poke a finger through or let a ray of sunshine throw polka dots on the floor.

And if the New York Hall of Science sold a model kit for building a tabletop version of the new wing out of onionskin, wooden straws and rubber bands, kids could absorb fine architecture through their fingertips.

The New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park opens its new exhibition hall Thanksgiving Day with extended hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Regular hours are Monday through Thursday from 9:30 to 2, Friday from 9:30 to 5, and Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 6. Admission is $9 adults, $6 students and seniors and $2.50 children 4 and under. For information, call 718-699-0005 or go to www.nyscience.org .

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[Kris]

www.nyscience.org/expansion

http://www.archnewsnow.com/features/Feature154.htm

[Kris]

November 24, 2004

MUSEUM REVIEW

From Internet Arm Wrestling to the Magic of Math

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

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The new wing of the New York Hall of Science.

Forget for a moment that a new wing of the New York Hall of Science in Queens is opening today. Or that within its 55,000 square feet of exhibition space, illuminated by daylight filtered through translucent fiberglass-clad walls, it is possible to arm wrestle someone in Anchorage, Alaska, using the Internet. Or to watch a golden orb spider weave its web. Or to sample the scent of a meteorite. Or even to find an indoor supervised play area that looks like a preschool in a park.

These attractions have their appeal, of course. And the $89 million expansion of the science center, which includes the new wing (designed by Polshek Partnership Architects), as well as the refurbishment of the museum's outdoor rocket park from its 1960's World's Fair days, is bound to increase the hall's annual attendance of 275,000.

But I was more strongly lured into the older, darker part of the museum, where participatory exhibits about optical illusions overlook the main floor, with its kiosks about microbes and molecules. There, seeming a bit cramped, is the debut of another exhibition, recently bought from the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

In the science museum world, where education is typically wedded to the latest in high-tech participatory effects, this exhibition bears the unusual distinction of being more than 40 years old and proud of it. Some paper labels are starting to discolor; some facts are out of date; some references have the patina of another era. Indeed, the exhibition probably violates almost every precept of contemporary museum design, with display cases meant to be closely read and push-buttons that perform only perfunctory duty.

But it is also one of the most famous science exhibitions ever, dealing with one of the most recalcitrant subjects: mathematics. Called "Mathematica," it was created for I.B.M. in 1961 by the design team of Charles and Ray Eames, who also designed the I.B.M. Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. Since the fair gave birth to the Hall of Science, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the museum might even be considered a distant relative of "Mathematica." The show is also the ancestor of many contemporary science exhibitions, predating the participatory displays that were pioneered by the Exploratorium in San Francisco and are now the dominant science museum style.

I can also testify to the influence of "Mathematica" because I saw it as a child. I still recall wired structures rising out of soapy liquid, their swirling surfaces demonstrating solutions of mathematical problems; the cubic array of bulbs that translated simple multiplication into three-dimensional patterns of light; the suspended Moebius strip - a surface with only one side and one edge - on which a train continuously ran. Now, decades later, that early thrill is gone, but the exhibition accomplished just what an exhibition is meant to, inspiring wonder and persistent curiosity. Its longevity in science museums in Boston, Atlanta, Chicago and California proves that I was not alone.

So what relationship does "Mathematica" have to the more contemporary currents of museum life in the new hall? Despite common origins, they seem to emerge from different universes. "Mathematica" samples varied branches of mathematics, not blanching from explaining functions or projective geometry; contemporary exhibitions set their sights lower, restricting each display's focus. "Mathematica" knows you won't fully understand it all, but the contemporary museum exhibition wants you to - or at least the portion presented.

And "Mathematica" deals in conceptual play, while contemporary exhibitions encourage literal play. "Mathematica" includes, for example, a display case about the 19th-century genius Sir Francis Galton, citing his polymathic abilities, his pioneering use of fingerprints for identification and his eccentric interests (which included writing a paper about "gregariousness in cattle"). Contemporary displays are more concerned that you grasp a single concept. They are play stations in a science lesson.

That is also how they are used by the Hall of Science, which trains teachers while also employing "explainers": high school and college students, eager to help curious viewers. There are now 150 explainers on staff, some working 15 hours a week. As the hall's director, Alan J. Friedman, pointed out while giving a visitor a tour, the educational experience is paramount.

But experience and education mix in varying proportions. One new exhibition, "The Sports Challenge," for example, puts much more emphasis on experience. Discussions of friction, rotation and laws of motion are almost incidental as visitors balance on a mechanical surf board or measure their pitching speed in a batting cage. Physical experience becomes a source of physics, just as it does in the museum's imaginative outdoor playground.

Another new exhibition, "The Search for Life Beyond Earth," puts more emphasis on education, demonstrating water's importance to life. The lessons are simple and clear. But the experiences offered vary greatly, from the clever (a scale on which your weight is represented by a giant tube that fills with the number of gallons of water your body would typically include) to the pointless (a maneuverable mini-Hubble "telescope" that focuses on a backdrop of the heavens, sending mini-images of mini-photographs of galaxies to a mini-LCD screen).

But the most ambitious new exhibition, "Connections: The Nature of Networks," deals with a subject that should be part of a contemporary "Mathematica." "Connections" tries to demonstrate how complex phenomena grow out of simple rules, how networks work, and how they affect everything from social interaction to electric grids.

It is an enterprising if flawed exhibition, whose highlights offer some hope that it will gradually evolve. The arm-wrestling kiosk, for example, adds some amazement to a phenomenon - the Internet - that is now becoming commonplace. Grasp a metallic arm, and a video screen shows your opponent, who can be sitting just behind you or in a comparably equipped science center across the country. The force you impose on the arm is transmitted via the Internet and translated into a force wielded by the mechanical arm on the other end. More refined versions of such interactions are beginning to be used in medicine; here, the possibilities become palpable.

And what would a show about networks be without an anthill or a spider web? A video camera focuses on leaf-cutter ants molding their home, each ignorant of the larger task, while nearby, live spiders weave their webs in an open display.

But how much understanding is inspired by these images? What Mr. Friedman said about the problems that needed to be solved to make Internet arm wrestling work - problems with network delays, signal interruptions and smoothing of anomalies - could have been illustrated in the exhibition itself and would have made the nature of the Internet much more apparent. Moreover, despite the exhibition's assertions, spider webs with their "precisely engineered structures" do not provide convincing analogies for the Internet, where resilience derives from redundancy, from continuingly varying paths, from constantly shifting nodes.

There is also too little textual explanation. A display showing seashells is called "Where Math Meets Nature." But there is no explanation of how a nautilus shell develops out of simple mathematical rules - something actually illustrated in "Mathematica." A computer simulation might have helped. Yet when a computer simulation is offered - of the mathematician John Conway's "Game of Life," with its grid mutating according to programmed rules - the game isn't taught clearly enough. Meanwhile, a display showing how musical elements combine and influence one another in a network of interrelations is so bewildering that the point is lost.

Mr. Friedman emphasized that the new exhibitions, designed by staff members, are only beginning their evolutionary life. Children will be interviewed; explainers will be at work; texts and demonstrations will change. "There is another year of work to do before the exhibition will be done," he said.

Right now, though, "Connections" demonstrates two opposing risks: that of condescension and that of opacity. It is both too simple, given the complexity of the subject, and too complex, given the simplicity of its points. A scientist might be bored by it; a child might find little to provoke further inquiry.

"Mathematica," despite its own flaws, avoided both of those dangers. Over the course of decades, it has lured both professionals and children. It still exudes confidence. It invites attention not by promising participatory sensation but by offering beauty and elegance. It spurs curiosity not by aiming for simplicity but by offering hints of complexity.

So a visit to the welcome new wing should also include a detour. For while the hands-on style of the Exploratorium is everywhere triumphant, and often justly so, there is also room for something more daring and perhaps more involving, something that "Mathematica" represents. It might be called an Explanatorium.

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In the new wing, a physics lesson with bubble blowing.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company