Museum Review: The Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas

Allison V. Smith for The New York Times

The Discovering Life Hall at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. More Photos ?

DALLAS ? When you approach the new $185 million Perot Museum of Nature and Science, which opens here on Saturday, it is clear that you are not being led into a serene temple, where a harmonious cosmic order is going to be revealed. The building is alluring but unsettling. Is the museum?s 10-story concrete cube splitting apart or being pieced together? Is it being held intact by an enormous brace ? a transparent protrusion on the cube?s side containing a 54-foot-long escalator ? or is that a destabilizing gash that pierces the building?s body?

And does that cube seem to rest on an undulating acre of raised landscape planted with native Texas grasses because it is at home in that pastoral setting, or is the whole thing a map of eruption and cataclysm?

As seen from above, that rooflike plinth seems to ripple with promise, yet, from below, it can seem strewed with the sedimentary wreckage of the local skyline. The building is solemn with its robust abstractions and playful with its curves and striations. The architect Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis Architects have created a structure that seems to be a manifestation of unseen forces, perhaps even reflecting processes not yet fully understood.

The effect isn?t false advertising, for within the museum?s 180,000 square feet of space and 11 exhibition halls (including a children?s museum), the visitor is led through a cosmos that can itself be dizzying: miniature worlds of systems and interactions; invocations of things known and half known; sensations, simulations and reflections; accounts of dissolution and evolution. It is a survey of the scientific universe, with galleries about space, fossils, birds, geology, weather, ecology, health, engineering and other fields.

You can stand inside a tent made of high-resolution video screens to tour the planets and then walk through a history of cosmology. You can trace the fossil record of a once-underwater Texas ecology and notice the prevalence of amateur fossil hunters in local paleontology. You can wear 3-D glasses while looking at a video of a mountainous scene, and glide through it as a virtual bird, by tilting your arms. You can alter the winds blowing across a virtual ocean?s surface or see how volcanoes accumulate along the boundaries of colliding tectonic plates.

One display shows the imposing drill bits used to extract oil from the earth, and you can find one of the few explanations in any science museum of how hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, works (along with a rumbling special-effects video ride, supposedly drilling into Texas?s untapped shale).

There are exquisite mineral crystals here, including a 1.5-ton geode whose halves you can manipulate with a wheel. There are slices of human cadavers mounted in glass; sensors that allow you to launch table-tennis balls with brain signals; simple robots that can be programmed to maneuver through a maze; a MIDI playpen of musical sounds and possibilities; and a 55-foot-long ?running wall? ? you can race alongside moving images of a full-size cheetah, a Tyrannosaurus rex or contemporary athletes.

This is not science approached through calm reflection or detached reverence. It is not the science of the traditional natural history museum, with its origins in the 19th century. It is the science of the ?science center,? our era?s answer to earlier genres.

The center?s stage is typically immense, its claimed territory boundless, its age range universal. The center?s buildings are increasingly used as a demonstration of environmental principles (here that includes the capturing of rainwater and other sustainable practices). And its variety can be overwhelming.

That is part of the lure, for large audiences must be served. Science centers are meant to overwhelm, although, at their worst, the sensation of amazement comes more from the spectacle than from the subjects.

The Perot suffers from some of the genre?s flaws, particularly in the scale of its ambitions. Years of school curriculums are built into these displays, and entire lectures can grow out of a single label. It is difficult to absorb fully the history of cosmological exploration in a series of panels. Brief videos about particular scientists are meant to inspire aspirants, but few personalities are that intriguing, and most of them will probably remain unwatched.

And you can often feel spun about from the displays? short attention spans. Twenty-five rock specimens map out Texas?s geology; the genetic foundations of evolution whiz by.

But the museum?s impact is considerable. The interest in design and spectacle is here, of course; in fact, the museum uses three exhibition design sources: Amaze Design, Paul Bernhard Exhibit Design and the Science Museum of Minnesota. But the cumulative effect comes not from the individual displays but from the museum?s overall spirit. You get a sense of the world as something immense, provocatively puzzling and worth exploring more closely. Even the benches here are meant to spur thought.

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science is in Victory Park in Dallas; (214) 428-5555, perotmuseum.org.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/arts/design/the-perot-museum-of-nature-and-science-in-dallas.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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