A Look Inside the New Brooklyn Children's Museum
[nggallery id=”22035″ template=galleryview] We were lucky enough to be given a sneak preview of the new $48 million Rafael Vinoly-designed addition to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum yesterday. (Another $16 million is being spent on the interiors and exhibitions.) The L-shaped addition, which used over 8 million yellow tiles on its exterior, makes the BCM the…
[nggallery id=”22035″ template=galleryview]
We were lucky enough to be given a sneak preview of the new $48 million Rafael Vinoly-designed addition to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum yesterday. (Another $16 million is being spent on the interiors and exhibitions.) The L-shaped addition, which used over 8 million yellow tiles on its exterior, makes the BCM the first LEED-certified museum in the city. In addition to using green building materials, the design incorporates a number of energy-saving devices such as light and heat sensors to maximize efficiency. In addition to new entry and outdoor areas, the two most striking portions to the addition are a colorful play and learning area for small children designed by May & Watkins (slides 13 and 14) as well as a multi-storefront streetscape being built in the old portion of the building. As you can see from the slideshow, they’re on the home stretch. As of now, the ribbon-cutting is scheduled for some time in September.
Awww maaaan. This place aint open yet? I was gonna take my neices who will be visiting from out of town this weekend.
But it’s an addition. Is the original museum worth visiting at this time?
The museum, yes, has a look from its moment. Don’t fault it too much. When it opened, no one thought it was that ugly and the look wasn’t shocking.
One thing they wanted to do with it was to have it below grade to a large extent to minimize its impact on the neighborhood. Today, seems everyone wants to have as much glorifying impact on all their neighbors so the tendency has been to build up and up. Exhibit A: glass towers painfully out of place wedged into tight lots in the East Village surrounded by tenement buildings.
The museum has probably THE largest ground water heating systems in NYC. It is a major feature and should be talked about more often. It uses ground water as a source for its heat and cooling. This is major considering how much energy often mostly vacant museum buildings use.
FortGreeneGardener
All new buildings suck. Landmark everything. I love vacant lots. Buck Fush. Free Mumia.
My daughter asks me everyday when this place is going to open. Thank goodness it’s almost done.
Big flat yellow thing, huh? Well, to paraphrase Dan Ackroyd in “Bag o’Glass”: “Hey! Kids love big flat yellow things!”
Agree that the staffing and maintenance will ultimately affect the visitor experience way more than the bigness, yellowness, flatness. Like its “interactive” cousin in Queens the NY Hall of Science, this museum tended to specialize in grubby manipulables (I think that’s the buzzword for “supposedly educational stuff your kid handles and sucks on), broken interactives, and bored teen “helpers” or whatever they call them (the Hall of Science calls them “Explainers,” although they can seldom explain much). The programming was also so rigorously multi-culti that we suspected our Irish/German/Slavic kid could have gone a lifetime without seeing any of her cultures “celebrated.” Well, thank God we’ve aged out of the whole kiddie-museum scene; it was one of those obligatory bits of urban parenting that I won’t really miss.
Bitter impotent men and barren women please STFU and adopt. My kids love it as well.
That building is so ugly and out of context with the surrounding area.
I hope they manage to keep this one cleaner than the old one. In addition to always have broken and missing areas in most of the exhibits, the place was dirty.
I stopped taking my kids there because they always got sick or showed a rash right after each visit.
Anything that is touched, drooled on, handled the way the exhibits are designed to must be disinfected constantly.
They always had staff in the old place, but no supervision to make sure the teens were not huddled socializing in the corners instead of paying attention to the participants and exhibits.
12:17 guest, that’s the attitude! Kids will love it and nobody will miss it. In fact, attendance may be boosted by lost Ikea-goers who got confused with the Mapquest directions to Red Hook.
FYI..The Brooklyn Children’s Museum was the first children’s musuem in the country. We didn’t just get one. The large capital committment by the city and the state demonstrates the importance of being first in class.