Brooklyn Children's Museum unveils expansion. (Design and Development).

Brooklyn Children's Museum, the world's first museum created expressly for children, unveiled plans for a striking expansion of its building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The $39 million project will double the museum's capacity and size (to a total of 102,000 SF) and make it an environmental leader in the museum field. The new building features a bold design by internationally acclaimed architect Rafael Vinoly, at whose lower Manhattan office the unveiling of the design took place.

Dignitaries, including representatives from the city and state governments, joined Brooklyn Children's Museum board of trustees chair Paul Gangsei and president Carol Enseki, at the unveiling to honor the museum's 103-year history and anticipate its bright future in the new space.

"Rafael Vinoly celebrates the museum's creativity with an outstanding architectural statement--a building as unique and vital as the exhibitions and programs the Museum presents. But this expansion is about more than an intriguing new design," said Gangsei. "It's about the museum's ability to provide extraordinary learning adventures for a growing number of schoolchildren and families who visit this educational and recreational resource."

Rafael Vinoly has created sophisticated, modem designs for public institutions, cultural organizations, and corporations in places as disparate as Cairo and Queens, Buenos Aires and the Bronx. Vinoly's design gives the Brooklyn Children's Museum a bold, undulating facade of daffodil yellow and porthole-like windows set at varying heights so even toddlers can enjoy the view.

The brightly colored structure may well be unlike any other building the young visitors have ever seen. Vinoly says,

"I think there needs to be an awareness that buildings you put up have a real effect on a city, on people's lives. Architecture is a force for creating civic pride. And in the case of Brooklyn Children's Museum, also a force for shaping the creativity of young minds."

Vinoly's architecture has a sustained structural originality that transcends the passing fads of architectural movements. The recipient of the American Institute of Architects' 1995 Medal of Honor, Vinoly has said that architecture is "an art of dealing with heaviness," and in his designs for the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia and the Tokyo International Forum, transparent and opaque glass form floors, walls and ceilings that appear to float and soar.