Science in a Magical Space

Science in a Magical Space
Architect Todd Schliemann covers all the angles while shedding light with his Japanese-inspired addition to the New York Hall of Science.

In 1964, when the World's Fair came to Queens, America was gazing straight up - at the moon, at outer space, at ambitions bounded only by the Milky Way.

In Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, that quaint future has been preserved and refurbished. A pair of space age rockets, freshly polished and newly installed, stands at attention outside the New York Hall of Science, noses pointed toward the stratosphere.

But verticality has lost some of its cachet. The moon conquest is old news, President George W. Bush's proposal to send a team to Mars was met with muted enthusiasm, and the future feels as though it is best approached aslant.

Accordingly, the newest extension of the hands-on teaching museum, a 55,000-square- foot exhibition hall designed by Todd Schliemann of Polshek Partnership Architects that opens Thursday, shoots off at all sorts of angles.

The roof line dips, the walls lean, the ceiling folds and staircases whirl and curve. Seen through the window at the glass-tipped end of the wing, it's the rockets that look wrong, their cockeyed uprightness at odds with the building's judicious tilt.