Brooklyn Children’s Museum
Innovative architecture using a time-tested material
Rafael Viñoly believes that technological innovation is crucial for the advancement of architecture as a discipline. But for him, clearly such technological innovation doesn’t necessarily equal the use of new materials. Sometimes a time-tested product like ceramic mosaics offers the perfect means for innovative architecture. A case in point is the expansion of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, a project designed almost a decade ago by Viñoly’s New York-based office. This highly sustainable building is finished with a ceramic skin, which looks as fresh today as it did when it was just completed.
The museum extension by Rafael Viñoly (born in 1944, in Montevideo, Uruguay) covers 9,000 square metres of museum space, almost 2,000 square metres of roof terrace and another 1,000 for a garden. In 2015, this roof terrace received an add-on, designed by Future Green Studio and Toshiko Mori, to accommodate outdoor activities and events, under what Mori describes as ‘a three-season, open-air canopy’. But otherwise the building has remained unchanged, and has weathered its first decade effortlessly.
Viñoly boasts that still today it is the only LEED-certified green museum. Much of the LEED certification is related to the museum’s low energy consumption, but the durable exterior finish is important as well, to qualify for this standard of sustainability. Ceramics are durable and low-maintenance and, as the Children’s Museum shows, do not lose any of their original freshness.
The upper part of the museum consists of a slightly bulging form covered in bright yellow tiles by the architectural ceramics specialist AGROB BUCHTAL. On the corner of Brooklyn and St. Mark’s Avenue, a red-and-green ceramic wall frames the museum’s main entrance.
The yellow, red and green allow the building to stand out in the urban landscape of Brooklyn, and accentuate that the museum is geared at a young target group of children, who come here to explore, play and learn. It is a convention to make architecture for children colourful, so Viñoly is in that sense spot-on. But the Children’s Museum is no outlier in his work, which displays a distinct preference for sophisticated boldness. This translates in many of Viñoly’s projects into eye-catching forms and the use of striking colours. In that sense, there is a clear continuity between his first projects for the Bank of the City of Buenos Aires, which he designed as a twenty-something in Argentina in the late 1960s, the Children’s Museum, and recent works such as his controversial Walkie Talkie Tower in the City of London, with its concave facade, and the super slender 432 Park Avenue residential tower in Manhattan.
Almost every Viñoly building ventures into new directions, and this is true for the Children’s Museum as well, which differs from all his other designs prior to or after this project. Paradoxical as it may sound, this exceptionality makes the Brooklyn museum vintage Viñoly. And its first decade of maturation is a proof of the strength and resilience of its ceramic exterior, as the Children’s Museum promises to stay forever young.
