The new Gilder Center has folds of pink granite outside, rough shotcrete swoops within.
Photographs byInside, there’s no distinction between skeleton and skin. The space was sculpted by shaping cages of rebar and mesh and spraying wet concrete onto the forms through a high-pressure nozzle. Then workers troweled on a final layer of the same stuff, leaving it deliberately rough to the touch. Seen from across the void, the surfaces look sinewy and powerful, like the hide of a giant beast. Up close, they feel gouged, pitted, and scarred.
Gang aimed to meet a few contradictory goals, among them to give the place a more rational plan and smooth the movement of crowds. The atrium functions as a kind of trailhead, where multiple paths shoot off in different directions, forming loops so that visitors won’t drift into dead ends and have to retrace their steps.
Spectacle in architecture is out of fashion these days. Frank Gehry’s baroque billows and Zaha Hadid’s swirls belong to a more frankly exuberant age; today, self-indulgence gets camouflaged as environmental sensitivity. At the Gilder Center, Gang has managed to merge the sculptural impulse of an artiste with the institution’s public concern for planetary health. Not without compromise, though.
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