The Gilder Center Reorders Natural History

When you enter the atrium of the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation—the $465 million addition to the American Museum of Natural History that is opening May 4—you are not fully prepared for the effect. I recall the excitement, when I was a kid, of climbing into the wooden model of a human heart at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute and hearing the thumping as I followed the path of blood through its chambers. Here there is no thumping, but you have clearly walked into the innards of some giant bodily organ. Or perhaps—as my colleague Michael Lewis points out—it is less biomorphic than geomorphic.

Jeanne Gang, whose firm, Studio Gang, designed the center, has suggested a resemblance to the stone formations of the American Southwest. You stand in an enclosed canyon gazing at land bridges, cavernous hollows and curves that appear to have been shaped by erosion from wind and water. Here, light beams down from skylights, five stories above. It is the largest open space in the entire museum complex. Elsewhere in the museum, such spaces were designed to house things: enormous dinosaur specimens or a giant blue whale. Here, nothing is on display—only pseudo-natural forms under sprayed concrete.

This entrance is certainly not paying tribute to the human agency of the place—to the enormous enterprise of collecting, research and presentation that shaped this institution. That is what the Romanesque stolidity and castle-like ornaments of other buildings proclaim: pride and permanence. But here, the museum seems intent on evoking the untrammeled natural world—not permanence but ever-continuing transformation.

This emulation of nature has some benefits. The library reading room and 18 new classrooms are bathed in outdoor light. The same sense of openness makes its way into the now-permanent living butterfly vivarium.

But I also think these benefits are incidental to the main point. The center’s complete rejection of its museum surroundings makes a challenge; it has an edge. It may also be a reflection of transformations in the museum itself.

First, though, tribute should be paid to the more traditional museological business in exhibits designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates and the museum staff. A new 5,000-square-foot insectarium—the first permanent exhibition devoted to insects here in more than 50 years—is marvelous. These creatures that mostly, well, bug us now fascinate us. Insects play dead, mimic other insects, and are camouflaged to look like leaves. We see them on touch screens, pinned to display boards, and as living specimens. In a display that adds creepiness to wonder, we walk under a translucent “skybridge” through which leafcutter ants pass, bearing leaf-snips to transparent glass spheres where they build their homes with the help of masticated fungus.

The museum has also moved 12% of its wide-ranging collection to the new center, offering windowed walls through which we see cabinets and staff. Each window also displays samplings of the museum’s holdings, including butterflies caught by the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, wasp nests and African Maasai beadwork. The only misstep is in a display of “Chinese housewares”: The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is described as “a sweeping campaign” to reshape Chinese society; more accurately, the housewares, which include mugs celebrating an oil refinery and a bowl illustrated with a girl reading Mao Zedong, provided kitschy propaganda for a movement that may have led to a million deaths and destroyed a generation of intellectuals and artists.

Otherwise, these displays are excellent and could have appeared in any part of the museum. But another exhibition, “Invisible Worlds,” is much more attuned to the new center and the transformation it reflects. “All life on Earth is related,” we are told at the start. “Your hand resembles a bat’s wing. Your cells have the same structure as the cells of a pineapple.” And “You share ancestors with every living thing on Earth.”

“Which are you more closely related to?” asks a touchscreen. A mouse, say, or an opossum? The mouse. Because mice are placental; their young develop in wombs. Humans and mice have a common ancestor some 65 million years ago; the opossum connection was 130 million years ago.

The human is thus deeply inserted into the natural world, with connections to every other living creature, knit into an ecological system of interdependence, even affecting the food we eat (as other touchscreens demonstrate). In 1853, when a natural history museum was being planned for Oxford University, one advocate suggested that the placement of each object should correspond to the place it had in “God’s own Museum.” Nature’s order was to be replicated. By the end of the 19th century, that order had to be rethought because of the theory of evolution. Static Linnaean categories of genus and species would give way to a history of life forms. Within the past few decades, other kinds of connections—as in these examples—have developed, expanding evolutionary perspectives by exploring habitats and relationships among species. Natural history becomes even less human-centric and more subject to revision—which is why the new center’s design pays tribute to the natural world rather than the human one. And this exhibition demonstrates that world’s character.

Its climax is in a space with a 23-foot-high wall circling a floor the size of a hockey rink. For 12 minutes every surface becomes a projection screen and we are immersed in swirling webs of interactions within the ocean, the forest and the human brain. The presentation is sensational. You don’t learn much, but you get a visceral feeling: There are connections to be made, and our natural history museums are just beginning to take their measure.

—Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s Critic at Large.