Exploratorium Redux

Digital Design Culture in Architecture
Challenging the established tendencies in digital design

The City of Ontario has become an important logistics hub in Southern California.  Left behind in this growth, however, are expert fields such as physics and engineering.  This project proposes a museum to inspire future generations in these fields through the conversion of a large distribution warehouse into a branch of the Exploratorium, the well-known learning center in San Francisco. The project uses digital design methods to create a highly dynamic space that is able to adapt to the needs of the museum.  It challenges the current trajectory in digital design that limits the potential of the architect by polarizing the theoretical discussion of architecture between fine art and applied science, arguing that when dealing with the programmatic elements of a museum in which exhibits are consistently being replaced and updated, digital design allows for the better development of indeterminate spaces. Its architectural approach builds upon the tradition of industrial buildings in which activities on the floor are enabled by services distributed in a complex of overhead systems. It amplifies the effects of this overhead servicing so that a large-scale responsive ceiling system provides all of the functions required by the museum, including volumetric differentiation of interior spaces, transforming the empty box into a space of curiosity and fascination.

Pioneering the Idea of the Exploratorium

More than 40 years ago, Frank Oppenheimer started a movement that transformed education: He founded the Exploratorium, the prototype for more than 1,000 hands-on, participatory institutions that exist around the world today.

The Exploratorium also pioneered the idea that science institutions like ours are bona-fide teacher education institutions. In fact, the Exploratorium produces more hours of teacher professional development than any other Bay Area institution, including universities and school systems. As a research and development laboratory for public learning, the Exploratorium receives more NSF funding than any other non-university nationwide. We were acknowledged in the 2007 book Forces for Good as one of the 12 most impactful nonprofits from the last 30 years—and the only one that was a museum.

- Executive Director of the Exploratorium, Dr. Dennis M. Bartels

Choosing the Site

The site for this project is located a great distance from any major educational draw, establishing Ontario as a principal community, leading the science and engineering push sweeping across Southern California.  Bordered with a large open space on the rear of the building, the site enables the building to expand and grow as future needs arise.  Situated among large “box” warehouses, the new Exploratorium will help push Ontario and the community within away from merely storage and shipping as a primary economy and towards a brighter more aspirational future.  

In approaching where to site the museum in Ontario, one must appreciate the current typographic qualities that currently make up the city.  Being a shipping and packaging hub for countless companies in Southern California, Ontario is full of expansive warehouses.  With the current economic climate, many sit empty, waiting.  Because of this unique opportunity,  an existing building was selected, with easy access to numerous streets and a highway infrastructure.  This affords the ability to focus on the system implementation, and how it would interact with the museum experience.

Analog to Digital

In the initial design phase, digital methodology was used in conjunction with analog modeling. The study of the resulting systems, shapes, patterns, and objects yields design ideas that are later used in the production of working prototypes. These first generation “sketch” models later prove invaluable to the understanding of how links, objects, and pieces interact with each other.

Collective System

Understanding how the entire building works collectively as a system for the harmonious use of the different divisions of the museum, the existing building is divided into zones. These zones are then distributed based upon their use and requirements. Different types of installations are patterned with how people might move throughout the structure, in order to devise a working sensibility of how the museum might function on a day to day basis.

Arrangement of Space

Building further on the concept of “zoning” the museum, areas of depression begin to occur, designating where an area starts and ends. These zones are comprised of installations that relate to each other, many of them dealing with the senses. For example zones filled with installations related to visual affects or audio affects. Because the open void of a large warehouse is so expansive, areas that further break up the space begin to emerge. These pods come down from the ceiling and pierce the surface of the floor. The pods also afford the ability to have completely enclosed spaces, where people can occupy the space between the ceiling and the tiles. This area can also be used to create balconies, storage, and workshop space.

Digital Integration

The integration and application of digital design manifests itself by utilizing a parametric tile ceiling
surface. The over-head “mesh” of tiles allows for the interior of the museum to be almost completely open. The interior spaces are defined by the ceiling’s ability to deform and come down, impacting the ground plane. Rooms and spaces are able to grow with or shrink with program requirements, installation requirements, and population of the space. This ability to adapt to it’s environment allows the building to be maintain a higher level of sustainability by only conditioning spaces with volume.

Neil Spiller

“Much recent architecture, especially well-known examples, have been devoid of humanity, and panders to a need for ever more gratuitous complex surfaces & structures. This justifies or obscures their simple,
apolitical and vacuous objectives.”

The Great Forgetting: Digital Solipism and the Paradox of the Great  “Forgetting”