Expansion fever seems to have swept New York City’s storied cultural institutions. Like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History has announced plans to increase its space. It will augment its Upper West Side Manhattan campus with a six-story addition devised by Chicago architect Jeanne Gang. Set to house new galleries (by local firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates), educational facilities, and spaces for connecting the public to the museum’s research areas, the new annex will comprise 218,000 square feet. Visuals for the space have not yet been released.
Though she is perhaps best known for Aqua Tower—the 2010 Windy City residential spire famed for its cloak of wavelike balconies—Gang, a 2014 AD Innovator, has also earned accolades for her ecologically sensitive designs for Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo and the WMS Boathouse at Clark Park. In a press release, museum officials cite her previous work and Gang’s demonstrated “sensitivity to sustainability and the relationship between nature and the built environment, particularly in urban settings” as reasons for the firm’s triumph over others’ proposals. Work on the addition is scheduled to finish in 2019, coinciding with the museum’s 150th anniversary.
