New York Hall of Science
The Great Hall
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HISTORY OF THE GREAT HALL:
The City of New York provided the money to build a permanent Museum of Science and
Technology at the site of the World's Fair and it opened in 1965. In the words from its
opening press release: "In the Great Hall of the building, Martin-Marietta
Corporation will provide a majestic ten-minute show in which 400 visitors at a time will
be introduced to the story of science and man's search for knowledge. The audience will be
engulfed from all sides with light and color and sound in a presentation that will lead
from the beginnings of science up to the new experiences that await man in his first step
into outer space. It will be climaxed by a demonstration of 'Rendezvous in Space,'
employing two, full-sized manned orbital space vehicles. The meeting 'in space' takes
place high above the heads of visitors in the cathedral-like Main Floor. The production
includes wide screen motion pictures, directional sound, and animated figures." At
that time, they felt an orbital space station could be built and launched into space
within the following 10 years.
The theme for the fair, "Man's Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding
Universe" was the mandate that inspired Harrison, the architect for the new Museum of
Science. Ever since the Russians had launched Sputnik in 1957, the popular imagination was
thought to conceive of science in terms of "outer space", so Harrison tried to
create an environment that would evoke the stratosphere. He also believed that the
structure of a twentieth-century building devoted to exhibiting science should be clearly
visible. Consequently, his design bent a single, relatively thin (one-and-one-quarter
feet) eighty-foot-high wall into ten gentle undulations, the first two and the last two
overlapping with enough space between them to form an entranceway. Here, a thin wall did
the work of a thick wall using the same principle that makes a curved piece of paper stand
more firmly than a straight piece of paper. The Great Hall stood in the center of a
hexagonal pool of water, animated by gushing fountains, and crossed by a walkway at its
entrance. For the interior effect, he used a variation of the beton-glas technique, and
choose the same blue as that in Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to evoke the "infinity of
the heavens."
For more information call (718) 699-0005 or visit our website at: www.nyhallsci.org.