Cranbrook Institute of Science

The bracketing and shaping of exterior spaces with buildings which characterizes the Cranbrook campus is continued in our addition to the Cranbrook Institute of Science. The aim was to make the least intrusion on the architecture of the original Saarinen building while maximizing the potential for circulation and visiting experiences with the addition.

The new inner garden has a gently sloping and folding connection to the exterior campus grade. At the northwest corner, the new addition passes above the ground, allowing a “permeable” campus grade connection which provides orientation to garden exhibits, and an open and inviting feeling. An axis called “Stairway of  Inexplicables” is formed from the new entry, roughly parallel to the existing “Ramp of the Chinese Dog.” This new line of movement connects the Institute to existing nature trails along the sloping ground to the east.

BUILDING CONCEPT
The new addition opens up the dead end circulation of the existing 1937 galleries; the Hall of Minerals and the Hall of Man. A slipped “U” shape, like the scientific diagram for “Strange Attractors,” allows for multiple paths within the exhibitions and other programs of the Institute. With this concept as an analog, Steven Holl Architects aims for a free and open-ended addition that can easily adapt to change. Its circuits are unique, allowing for the potential that no visit to the new science museum will be a repeat experience, rather each engagement is provocative and unpredictable.

The new Institute is centered around an inner garden where scientific phenomena are exhibited in the open air. Within this “Science Garden” is the Story of Water; water in liquid, solid and vapor is featured in flow pools, a “House of Ice” and a “House of Vapor.” Upon entering, and throughout the exhibition loops, views of the science garden orient the museum visitor. A new “Light Laboratory” forms an entrance hall which functions as a changing exhibit with a south-facing wall of many types of glass.

Different phenomena of light, such as refraction and prismatic color, are displayed on the lobby walls as the sunlight changes. The basic structure of the addition is formed of steel truss frame spanned in pre-cast concrete planks which carry services and distribute air in their hollow cores. The exterior is clad in yellow Kasota Stone at the entry elevation, but gradually it changes to integral color concrete block on the North. The relation of stone to block is analogous to “phase space” which is a property of  “Strange Attractors.”