Bronx Children's Museum
opened december 3rd 2022
Located on the banks of the Harlem River, the Bronx Children's Museum aims to engage children with the connectivity of urban culture and the natural world. The design catalyzes the site's position between city grid and tidal river with a Museum Architecture of organic flow inside the rectangular frame of the existing historic powerhouse - a new kind of space unlike the city's cellular rooms and street grids, connecting to the geometry and experience of the natural landscape and waterfront.
Project Awards:
2023 ULI New York Award for Excellence in Adaptive Reuse
2023 Architizer A+Awards Popular Choice Winner Educational Interiors
2023 Architect Magazine Architecture & Interiors Award for Civic & Cultural Interiors
2023 AIANY Design Awards Citation for Interiors
2022 Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Award for Interiors-Institutional
Press:
New York Magazine: Bronx Children’s Museum is Just Antic Enough
“The firm O’Neill McVoy raised the city’s joy quotient with their design for the Bronx Children’s Museum’s first permanent home.”
Dezeen: O'Neill McVoy inserts mass-timber children's museum into 1920s Bronx powerhouse
Architectural Record: New Topographical Landscape by O’Neill McVoy Architects
“. . . the new Bronx Children’s Museum offers up a multisensory feast for voracious kids. Just ask them—on departure, they complete an “exit poll” on a magnetic board. Judging from the results, the kids are having a blast!”
Concept
The architecture of organic flow resonates with Jean Piaget's discoveries in The Child's Conception of Space: "prior to organizing a projective and Euclidean space, the child starts by building up and using certain primitive relationships such as proximity and separation, order and enclosure."
Cross laminated timber (CLT) walls, guardrails, and elevated floors are fabricated with advanced digital technology allowing for varying radii arcs to form organic spatial curves. The curved CLT and translucent acrylic partitions diverge, reconnect and spiral to create continuity and separation between exhibition spaces.
