DALLAS — When you approach the new $185 million Perot Museum of Nature and Science, which opens here on Saturday, it is clear that you are not being led into a serene temple, where a harmonious cosmic order is going to be revealed. The building is alluring but unsettling. Is the museum’s 10-story concrete cube splitting apart or being pieced together? Is it being held intact by an enormous brace — a transparent protrusion on the cube’s side containing a 54-foot-long escalator — or is that a destabilizing gash that pierces the building’s body?

And does that cube seem to rest on an undulating acre of raised landscape planted with native Texas grasses because it is at home in that pastoral setting, or is the whole thing a map of eruption and cataclysm?

As seen from above, that rooflike plinth seems to ripple with promise, yet, from below, it can seem strewed with the sedimentary wreckage of the local skyline. The building is solemn with its robust abstractions and playful with its curves and striations. The architect Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis Architects have created a structure that seems to be a manifestation of unseen forces, perhaps even reflecting processes not yet fully understood.

The effect isn’t false advertising, for within the museum’s 180,000 square feet of space and 11 exhibition halls (including a children’s museum), the visitor is led through a cosmos that can itself be dizzying: miniature worlds of systems and interactions; invocations of things known and half known; sensations, simulations and reflections; accounts of dissolution and evolution. It is a survey of the scientific universe, with galleries about space, fossils, birds, geology, weather, ecology, health, engineering and other fields.