Brooklyn's Progress
January 2003

– $39 Million Project Doubles Capacity and Impact of
World’s First Museum for Children

– Slated to be First “Green” Children’s Museum in Nation 
 
Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the world’s first museum created expressly for children, recently unveiled plans for a striking expansion of its building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  The $39 million project will double the Museum’s capacity and size (to a total of 102,000 square feet) and make it an environmental leader in the museum field.  The new building features a bold design by internationally acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly, at whose lower Manhattan office the unveiling of the design took place.

Dignitaries, including representatives from the City and State governments, joined Brooklyn Children’s Museum Board of Trustees Chair Paul Gangsei and President Carol Enseki, at the unveiling to honor the Museum’s 103-year history and anticipate its bright future in the new space. 

“Rafael Viñoly celebrates the Museum’s creativity with an outstanding architectural statement – a building as unique and vital as the exhibitions and programs the Museum presents.  But this expansion is about more than an intriguing new design,” said Mr. Gangsei.  “It’s about the Museum’s ability to provide extraordinary learning adventures for a growing number of schoolchildren and families who visit this educational and recreational resource.”
A World-Class Building by a World-Class Architect

Rafael Viñoly has created sophisticated, modern designs for public institutions, cultural organizations, and corporations in places as disparate as Cairo and Queens, Buenos Aires and the Bronx.  Mr. Viñoly’s design gives the Brooklyn Children’s Museum a bold, undulating façade of daffodil yellow and porthole-like windows set at varying heights so even toddlers can enjoy the view. 

The brightly colored structure may well be unlike any other building the young visitors have ever seen.  Mr. Viñoly says, “I think there needs to be an awareness that buildings you put up have a real effect on a city, on people’s lives.  Architecture is a force for creating civic pride. And in the case of Brooklyn Children’s Museum, also a force for shaping the creativity of young minds.”  

Rafael Viñoly’s architecture has a sustained structural originality that transcends the passing fads of architectural movements.  The recipient of the American Institute of Architects’ 1995 Medal of Honor, Mr. Viñoly has said that architecture is “an art of dealing with heaviness,” and in his designs for the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia and the Tokyo International Forum, transparent and opaque glass form floors, walls and ceilings that appear to float and soar. 

In the Brooklyn Children’s Museum design, he uses glass walls on the first floor to make the upper story appear suspended in space.  At night, the Museum will emit a soft glow through its glass walls and the second floor  “porthole” windows.  The upper floor of the Museum’s new L-shaped building – mostly new exhibit space – will be cantilevered above the ground floor, sheltering the lower floor from direct sunlight while still allowing people inside to see the surrounding neighborhood and Brower Park. 

In New York City, Mr. Viñoly has designed the forthcoming Frederick P. Rose Hall for Jazz @
Lincoln Center, an imaginative renovation of the Queens Museum of Art and the restoration and enlargement of the historic Snug Harbor Cultural Center in the Staten Island Performing Arts Complex, slated to open in 2003.  His design for the Bronx Housing Courthouse – a modern
structure with a large and complex program integrated into an urban context with a very prominent and distinctive character – proved so successful that he won a subsequent commission to build a
criminal courthouse in the borough.  He is a member of Think, a multidisciplinary, international team of architects and engineers that is one of the six teams chosen to develop plans for rebuilding the site of the former World Trade Center. 

Rafael Viñoly’s buildings stand on five continents and – with the completion of Brooklyn Children’s Museum – in each of the five boroughs of New York City, his adopted home.

Doubling Both Size and Impact

The expansion will significantly enhance the street presence of the largely subterranean Brooklyn Children’s Museum.  Fusing the old and new parts of the building with 3,000 square feet of renovated space, Mr. Viñoly’s design will add just over 51,000 square feet to the nearly 51,000 square feet the Museum currently occupies.  Importantly, it will enable the Museum to greatly expand the number of visitors it serves annually – from its current capacity of 250,000 to 400,000.  With groundbreaking scheduled for next year, construction is expected to be completed in 2006. 

“Our aim is to inspire children, so learning becomes an adventure that lasts a lifetime,” said Ms. Enseki.  “The Museum has always been a gateway to culture for our young visitors.  With our new, larger exhibition space and educational facilities, we’ll be able to fire the creativity and intellects of even more children from the New York area and beyond.”

A national model for education – and the only children’s museum in New York State to have achieved accreditation by the American Association of Museums – Brooklyn Children’s Museum has programs and exhibits aimed at a number of age ranges, from toddlers just beginning their education through teens exploring career options.  With the expansion, the Museum’s innovative Totally Tots program for pre-schoolers will have its own permanent home – a 2,500 square-foot gallery with child-powered vehicles and opportunities for care-givers to browse through parenting resources while they encourage their toddlers to get an early start to learning.  New science and cultural exhibitions will help children build knowledge and skills for the future.  The nationally recognized, award-winning Museum Team education and leadership program makes the Museum a daily, enriching presence in the lives of the more than 800 seven to eighteen-year-olds who enroll in this safe, fun and free after-school, weekend and summer program.  The expansion will provide new workshop space and a Museum Team Headquarters.

In the new building, technology will play a more prominent role than ever before.  Interactive multi-media stations in the Museum galleries will enhance exhibits; neighborhood families will have access to a new community computer area.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum remains one of only a handful of children’s museums with a permanent collection.  A new study facility created in the expansion – part gallery space, part laboratory – will give museum goers easy access to the Museum’s 27,000-item collection every time they visit.  This new area, called Collections Central, will allow the Museum to display more of its rich treasure trove of masks, animal specimens, textiles, pottery and other artifacts from around the world, and will allow children to touch and explore the incredible natural history and cultural objects.

The expansion will introduce new amenities for the Museum’s increasing numbers of visitors, like Kid’s Café, an eatery that will allow school groups and families to spend a full day together at the Museum – or even host a children’s party there, in separate “birthday party rooms.”  New galleries and classrooms will open onto the rooftop plaza of the existing building, creating delightful spaces for outdoor exhibits, workshops and performances. 

First “Green” Children’s Museum in the Nation

One of the core values the Museum instills in its young visitors is respect for the environment.  In keeping with that commitment, the Museum is slated to be the first “green” children’s museum in the nation, certified by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. 

In addition to conserving precious natural resources – and saving the City of New York, which owns the building in which the Museum is housed, an estimated $103,000 annually on energy costs – the “green” features will form the basis of innovative new programs and exhibits and provide children with hands-on learning opportunities about environmental issues.

The “green” features of the expanded facility include:

• A geothermal heating and cooling system – the first of its kind in a New York City cultural institution, which will use water-to-water heat pumps and six 300-foot-deep wells to heat and cool the building. This system will not only conserve energy, but also eliminate the need for onsite cooling towers along with their associated noise and emissions.   
• Photovoltaic panels on the roof – another first for a New York City cultural institution will harness the sun’s rays, generating about 2.5 percent of the Museum’s electricity.

Rafael Viñoly has incorporated into the design, state-of-the-art energy-saving elements such as:

• Enhanced insulation and low-emissivity glass, which is coated with a material that keeps the building warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than conventional window glass.
• Carbon dioxide sensors in the exhibit spaces that will adjust the ventilation system to the number of visitors in the space at any given time.
• Occupancy sensors that will turn on the lights in a gallery space when they detect the presence of body heat or movement.
• Photocells that will dim indoor lights when there is an abundance of natural light, and brighten them in cloudy weather or at night.

Special attention is being paid to the environmental character of building materials.  Renewable and recycled-content materials, including bamboo, cork and rubber flooring, linoleum and recycled carpeting are being used throughout.

The Museum intends to educate its growing audience about its environmentally friendly building
through participatory exhibits such as an Energy Garden – to demonstrate how the Museum harvests its solar power – and Energy Exploration areas where children can learn how the Museum uses water from deep in the earth to heat and cool the building.   Visitors will also learn about renewable resources, such as bamboo, which was chosen for the Museum’s flooring because it is one of the world’s fastest-growing plants.

Vital Member of the Community

“The children’s museum idea is Brooklyn’s gift to the world.”  That is even truer today than it was when one of the Museum’s early directors, Anna Billings Gallop, made the statement in 1926.   Since the “gift” was given, in 1899, some 300 children’s museums have opened around the globe. 
While nationally and internationally recognized, the Museum’s primary audience is families and children from the New York metropolitan area.  And the Museum takes very seriously its deep and long-standing commitment to the families and youth of central Brooklyn and Crown Heights, its home for 103 years. 

The Museum has established partnerships with public schools, community-based organizations, local cultural institutions, libraries, and parks.  These collaborations enhance the educational and cultural resources available to local families.  For example, throughout the summer, the Museum presents Free Friday Family Fun, a series of rooftop concerts for the community.    Families from all over Brooklyn come together at the Museum for evenings of wonderful music, and programs like these promote cultural understanding by exposing children to the world’s diversity.

“Over the years, Brooklyn Children’s Museum has become a trusted community resource.   We open doors of opportunity for the youth of Crown Heights, we are a lynchpin in the revitalization of the community, and an anchor that provides stability and economic investment in the area,” said Ms. Enseki.  “We’re pleased that we’ll have more room to offer programs that serve the community.”

The Museum’s original home was the Victoria era Adams Mansion located in Brower Park.  It was later supplemented by the Smith House, which was on the site of the Museum’s present location at 145 Brooklyn Avenue.  The Museum built its current, award-winning home in 1977.  The innovative structure – largely located below ground level – was designed by Hardy Holzman and Pfeiffer Associates.  The subterranean structure will remain part of the Museum’s signature, as will
the unique “stream” running through the building, part of the original Learning Environment exhibit designed by Edwin Schlossberg.  The new construction will be fully integrated with the Museum’s present building through a series of light-filled corridors, staircases, and wheelchair-accessible ramps.

Public-Private Partnership at Work

“New Yorkers were the first to create a children’s museum, and this significant expansion of our facilities will ensure that New York remains home to the nation’s foremost children’s museum in the new millennium,” said Mr. Gangsei.  “This dream is becoming a reality thanks to a public-private partnership that really works.  The design we’re unveiling today is a tribute to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s extraordinarily successful Centennial Campaign, launched on the occasion of our 100th anniversary in 1999, and to the Mayor, the City Council, the Brooklyn Borough President and the State Assembly, all of whom have devoted substantial funding and support toward this effort.  It has taken a real team effort to reach this milestone.  Kate Levin, the Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs; Kenneth Holden, Commissioner of Department of Design and Construction and their staffs have been outstanding partners in making this project possible.” 

Government, foundations and the corporate world – including The Charles Hayden Foundation, The Louis Calder Foundation, Independence Community Foundation, J.P. Morgan Chase, Booth Ferris Foundation, Morgan Stanley and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation – and individuals have all come together to raise the funds for this vital expansion.  To date, the Museum has raised $32 million toward the planning and implementation of the building expansion project’s $39 million cost – $26.7 million from government sources, and $5.4 million from private sources, including foundations, corporations and individuals. These funds will ensure that Brooklyn Children’s Museum can do for future generations what it has been doing for children since 1899 – introducing them to a lifetime of joyful learning and museum exploration.