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BRONX CHILDREN'S MUSEUM I NEW YORK I O'NEILL MCVOY ARCHITECTS
O'Neill McVoy Architects orchestrates a topographical playscape inside a former electric plant.
"WE'RE ALL children at heart," laughs Carla Precht, founding director of the Bronx Children's Museum. "The building was close to the water, and it looked like a castle-I thought it had all the makings of a wonderful space for kids," she adds. After 10 years of operating out of a purple school bus as a "museum without walls," in December the institution moved into a long-awaited brick-andmortar home and opened its doors to the public. Now it doesn't just have wheels-it has walls.
The Bronx Children's Museum occupies the upper floor of a powerhouse that once supplied refrigeration and electricity to the borough's nearby terminal market. Built between 1925 and 1929, the market was the first of its kind in New York and intended as a model for the sale of perishable goods in other boroughs. Today, only the powerhouse still stands-and with four crenellated turrets and arched brick corbeling, its castle-like form indeed invites curiosity. In 2010, the building was outfitted with a green roof, high-efficiency insulation and fixtures, and first-floor office space for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Three years later, O'Neill McVoy Architects, led by the husband-and-wife team of Beth O'Neill and Chris McVoy, was commissioned by the Department of Design & Construction to overhaul the top floor. But the bright, in-your-face polychromy typical of children's museums is noticeably absent from the interior architecture-instead, a subdued palette, natural materials, and winding walls engage the senses. It's a grown-up approach to design for children.
"The kids are coming from apartments, schools, and streets that are all orthogonal. We wanted to create a new kind of space that was open to their...