The Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks

"Established more than a century ago, the six-million-acre Adirondack Park, a mix of public and private lands roughly the size of Vermont, with huge stretches of wilderness has grown ever more remarkable as development has fundamentally altered much of the Northeast."

The museum "marries stunning design, paying homage to the great-camp vernacular with local stone and timber, and an educational philosophy that seeks to inject science with sizzle through high-tech multisensory exhibitions."

"Visitors enter via the Great Hall, a nine-sided space studded with nine birch trees. Directly ahead is a wall of glass overlooking an artificially created pond and wetland."

"A living river exhibition runs along one wall. It begins with a trout pool and then turns into a lower trout stream, then an upper trout stream and then a plunge pool before finally culminating in a waterfall where river otters cavort over faux boulders. An exhibit about marshes presents snapping turtles, smallmouth bass, northern pike, yellow perch and pumpkinseed sunfish. Psychedelically hued wood ducks and giant waterbugs are on their way."

"The architect, the firm of Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, has festooned the museum with huge, color-saturated nature photographs, along with projected images. There are also quotations worth pondering, blown up and illuminated, like one from Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814): 'Nature is one connected whole. At any given moment every part must be precisely what it is, because all other parts are what they are.'"

Source: "The Adirondacks Under Glass," The New York Times, July 7, 2006, by Lisa W. Foderaro. Read the story.