American Museum of Natural History rotunda
— the cast that meets you at the door.
Not only on a wall.
“The Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, the museum's grand entrance on Central Park West at 79th Street. Beneath the coffered barrel vault stands the world's tallest free-standing dinosaur mount, a Barosaurus rearing to defend her young from an Allosaurus, more than fifty feet up. The hall was completed in 1936 to John Russell Pope's design as the State of New York's official memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. from the studio
American Museum of Natural History rotunda, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda is the formal entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History, opening onto Central Park West at 79th Street. Designed by John Russell Pope as the New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt and completed in 1936, the hall sits behind a colonnaded façade and a triumphal arch flanked by four columns. Murals by William Andrew Mackay along the upper walls illustrate scenes from Roosevelt's life. The barrel-vaulted ceiling rises about a hundred feet above the floor.
Pope's design is faced in Milford pink granite and warm Indiana limestone, with the Roosevelt inscriptions cut into the upper walls in classical Roman capitals. The barrel vault is coffered plaster, painted to lift the cast skeletons that stand under it. The 1936 building replaced an older Romanesque entrance by Josiah Cady on West 77th Street, which still survives behind the museum's later additions. The Beaux-Arts symmetry of the rotunda follows the same civic vocabulary as Pope's later Jefferson Memorial.
The museum is open most days from 10:00 to 5:30 and closes on Thanksgiving and Christmas. General admission is pay-what-you-wish for New York State residents and a fixed fee for non-residents, with separate ticketing for the Hayden Planetarium and special exhibitions. The Central Park West entrance through the Roosevelt Rotunda reopened in 2012 after restoration. The 81st Street subway station beneath the museum is served by the B and C trains and connects directly into the lower lobby.