The unusual structure of organic shapes serves as a museum, it also has a home for various types of insects – News

The new wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York is called the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation, and it was almost a decade in the making to connect different parts of the museum’s campus. Its construction then cost 465 million dollars (10 billion crowns).

At first glance, the building impresses with its organic shapes, its curves are inspired by the canyons and caves of the American West. If they seem intertwined to you, then they have served their purpose. They are meant to support the main idea that everything in nature is interconnected.

While the Gilder Center building is preparing to receive the first visitors, its permanent residents have been in place for some time. And there aren’t many of them, I believe – over half a million!

We are talking about insects, of course, because in the center of the building there is a new exhibition of insects with 18 species, and there is clearly something to look forward to. Tiny ants march on a glass bridge above people’s heads. Giant whales race along the walls. Visitors can enter the Vivarium where they can admire more than a thousand moths and butterflies.

Scientists have created exhibits for individual species designed to be as close as possible to their natural habitats, and the small creatures feel comfortable in them. The butterfly garden thus imitates a tropical environment with its typically high temperatures and humidity.

And then there are ants, for example. In a section called the Insectarium, there are half a million ants of the genus atta, which walk in swarms with pieces of leaf up a glass bridge above visitors’ heads and head for glass flasks along the wall, in which you can watch them grow fungi on a substrate of collected leaves , which serve as food for them.

The Gilder Center building was designed by Studio Gang architects led by Jeanne Gang. Building with a usable area of ​​21,367 m2 is interesting in its own right as it connects the museum’s 11 buildings and creates a continuous campus across four city blocks, now completing the entire complex as the museum’s builders envisioned more than 150 years ago. In this sense too, the Gilder Center has become the embodiment of one of the museum’s basic messages: all life is connected.