The Hayden Sphere and the Rose Center
Polshek Partnership Architects, James Stewart Polshek and Todd Schliemann · Opened 2000
From Eighty First Street the museum ends in a cube of glass six storeys high, and inside it floats a white sphere the size of a large building. This is the Hayden Sphere, the heart of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which replaced the old Hayden Planetarium in 2000. The upper half of the sphere holds the planetarium theatre, where a projector and dome carry audiences through a map of the universe built from real astronomical data. The lower half is the Big Bang theatre, where you look down into a bowl and watch the first moments of the cosmos. Wrapped around the sphere in a slow descending spiral is the Cosmic Pathway, a ramp on which each step covers millions of years.
The architecture is itself an exhibit. The cube uses the largest suspended glass curtain wall in the country, held by a cable net so light that at night the sphere seems to hang in the open air. Along the walkways, the sphere serves as a unit of scale: models of planets, stars and galaxies are placed beside it so that if the sphere is the Sun, the Earth is the size of a ball you could hold, and if it is the Earth, the Moon hangs nearby the size of a beach ball. Below, the Cullman Hall of the Universe holds the Willamette Meteorite and displays on stars, galaxies and the search for life.
The original planetarium of 1935 was a beloved art deco building, and its demolition was controversial. The new centre was designed by James Polshek and Todd Schliemann, and it quickly became one of the most admired modern buildings in New York.
Did You Know? The spiral Cosmic Pathway is about one hundred and ten metres long, and the width of a single human hair at its end represents all of recorded history.
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