Sphere Of Influence

Natural History, Feb, 2000 by Henry S. F. Jr. Cooper

The reborn Hayden Planetarium, in the new Rose Center for Earth and Space, mirrors astronomy's radical reinterpretation of outer space.

Over the past several months, a sphere 87 feet in diameter-standing on a tripod inside a 120-foot cube made partly of glass--has taken shape on 81st Street near Central Park West in New York City. At night, under soft lights, it glows enigmatically. Is it a massive Christmas ornament inside a transparent box, or a Pop Art lightbulb in its container? Perhaps it's a model of the Sun: those round balls orbiting it seem to suggest as much. But when you enter the cube and look up from its first-floor balcony, you might, for all the world, be gazing at a spaceship surrounded by a multilevel gantry.

The sphere is, in fact, the home of the new Hayden Planetarium, centerpiece of the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, the Museum's newest addition. Its upper hemisphere is a much upgraded planetarium renamed the Space Theater (to distinguish it from its predecessor, the Sky Theater), while its lower hemisphere contains a searingly dramatic, you-are-there laser recreation of the big bang. Together with other elements of the Rose Center, the sphere was designed to illuminate aspects of and answers to cosmic questions: Where are we in space and time? How did we get here?

Everyone concerned with the new, $210 million Rose Center--including astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the planetarium; James Stewart Polshek, the architect; and Ralph Appelbaum, the exhibition designer--agrees that the sphere symbolizes a revitalization of the Museum that began in 1993, when its trustees picked a new president, Ellen V. Futter, then president of Barnard College.

To Futter, the center is an intellectual launching pad into the rest of the Museum. "From there," she says, "you might go across the ground-floor lobby of the main Museum to the spectacular new Hall of Biodiversity or the magnificent Northwest Coast Indians or go up to see the ever popular dinosaurs. Now we can take our visitors on a sweeping, exotic journey from the origins of the universe and the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets to the core of our own planet and on to an investigation of all life on Earth, its various ecosystems and habitats and range of species, including our own species and culture. I think we are the only museum in the world that can tell the comprehensive story of life in such a seamless way."

Throughout the planning, Tyson, Polshek, and Appelbaum have worked so interdependently that it is often hard to tell who thought of what. Despite the stresses and hard work that go with any large project, they had a very good time, and this is evident in the result. (They are quick to point out that many others, such as Polshek's partner Todd Schliemann, were vital to the creation of the Rose Center.)

The old Hayden Planetarium, which opened on October 3, 1935, had become a venerable New York icon in need of redefinition. To scientific purists, the last straw was a 1993 exhibition about the Star Trek television series that included a prominent display of Mr. Spock's pointy ears. As the fourth-oldest planetarium in the United States--after the Adler in Chicago (1930), the Fels in Philadelphia (1934), and the Griffith in Los Angeles (1935, just four and a half months before the Hayden)--the Hayden had become outmoded in many ways. Like the other, older planetariums, it was designed to specifications by the German company Carl Zeiss and was intended basically to house projectors; apart from their domes, these Art Deco buildings consisted mainly of corridors for getting people in and out of the big attraction: the sky theater showing views of the stars as seen from Earth. And the Hayden--in terms of its shows, at least--was stuck in a geocentric vision of the universe. It was as if the scientific revolution triggered by Copernicus's proposal in 1543 that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the Solar System had never occurred. An even bigger problem was that after the old Hayden was built, there were enormous advances in astrophysics and in our understanding of the universe, not to mention the advent of the space age and manned space travel.

A visiting committee of scientists, chaired by J. Richard Gott III, an astrophysicist from Princeton, had already been organized in the early 1990s to consider the planetarium's options. The first idea was to retrofit the building so that it could deal better with such matters as the big bang, star formation, and quasars, but the dark corridors of the Hayden did not lend themselves to exhibition spaces any more readily than the old Zeiss Mark VI projector housed within it lent itself to intergalactic displays.

Polshek, who joined the project at the retrofitting stage, toyed with the idea of completing the circle of the old Hayden dome, thus turning it into a sphere. The idea was to accomplish this without disturbing the dome's original supports, a series of columns that held it up like a table. "But when we drew it up as a sphere, it looked a little clunky" he says. The idea was shelved. Once Futter became president of the Museum in November 1993, planning began to heat up. By the time Tyson joined the planetarium staff in July 1994, several proposals for retrofitting were on the table. Futter then asked the scientists, architects, and designers what they would do if they had a blank slate. It was a seminal question. Conceptually whisking away the old building, Polshek lifted the sphere high into the air and onto a pedestal. Tyson had doubts. "It looked like a golf ball on a tee," he says.