Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation

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Visiting the Gilder Center

Spectacular architecture designed to spark your curiosity. New exhibitions and immersive experiences that reveal nature’s hidden realms. A soaring space that connects to all the Museum has to offer. 

The new Gilder Center features new exhibition galleries and one-of-a-kind experiences, including an insectarium, butterfly vivarium, floor-to-ceiling collections displays, and more—and connects to the rest of the American Museum of Natural History on four floors.

Entry to the Gilder Center is included with Museum admission. Additional tickets are required for the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium and the Invisible Worlds immersive experience.

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New Fossil: Apex Has Arrived!

Greeting visitors just inside the entrance to the Gilder Center is the largest and one of the most complete Stegosaurus specimens ever found, now on view in the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium.

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Apex Stegosaurus fossil mount on display in the Museum's Gilder Center. Alvaro Keding and Daniel Kim/© AMNH
Members See it Free!

Become a Museum Member today for an entire year of free access to the exciting exhibitions and experiences in the new Gilder Center.

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Adult stand holding a child inside the Richard Gilder Center, looking towards the skylight and glass entrance-way.  

More About the Architecture

It's being called “New York’s most exciting new building.” Inspired by natural formations that spark curiosity and exploration, the Gilder Center creates more than 30 connections among 10 of the Museum’s buildings to improve visitor circulation on campus. It was designed by Studio Gang, the international and urban practice design firm led by Jeanne Gang. 

 

The Gilder Center's unique, organic design is informed by the natural paths wind and water carve into landscapes that are exciting to explore, as well as the forms that water etches in blocks of ice. Visitors enter through the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium, a sunlit central space notable for its seamless, undulating interior of arching walls, bridges, and caverns that invites everyone to explore by offering alluring glimpses of exhibitions, collections spaces, and classrooms on four levels. The Griffin Atrium, like much of the Gilder Center, was constructed by spraying structural concrete directly onto rebar without formwork. This spray technique, known as "shotcrete," was invented by Museum naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley and is finished by hand.

 

The Gilder Center facade is clad in Milford pink granite–the same stone used for the Museum's entrance on Central Park West. The rounded windows are made of bird-safe fritted glass. The diagonal pattern of the stone panels evokes both the phenomenon of geological layering and the richly textured surface of the stone masonry on the 77th Street side of the Museum.

 

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