t is not uncommon to hear the director of a fine-art museum, presiding over the ribbon-cutting for a shiny new wing, declare that its architecture is so pathbreaking that the building itself, far from being a mere container, deserves to be thought of as part of the permanent collection. The architect Jeanne Gang, the lead designer of the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan, has given her clients every opportunity to make a similar claim. Here, though, the affinity to the collection flows not from an avant-garde approach, but, as seems fitting for a natural-history museum, a timeworn and elemental one. This new wing is anything but shiny.
