Introduction

The Exploratorium, San Francisco's groundbreaking Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception, is about to move from its historic location in Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts to a Pier along the city's waterfront. This is an occasion to meditate on a host of complex architectural issues, for a real project with a real program, client and site.

The studio will meet with administrators and curators at the museum and visit present and future sites as part of the process of investigating this unique institution's architectural potentials. The Exploratorium is unprecedented in its exhibits and the manner in which they are developed and presented. Housed currently in a building adapted to its use, it is now transitioning to another adapted site at an urban threshold.

Projects therefore require a response and attitude towards a history of museum architecture, towards the display and explication of scientific knowledge, and to relations between art and the sciences.

The studio will propose new modes of study and display that exploit synthesized models of physical and electronically mediated architectures for the museum.

Method

Our aim is to parse the mission of the Exploratorium into discreet studies for the architectural potentials in their relationship to one another:

a. Museum

b. Sciences

c. Arts

d. Human Perception

We will investigate architectural structures that form transitions between these elements that make up the learning model as it is developed by this institution. As such, creating transitional structures will be an important focus for the class in structural, programmatic, temporal, perceptual and other terms. The nature of these transitions will be unique to each project and inform the way the museum can move, inhabit its new site, and even curate in the future.

We will work at transitions between human, architectural, urban and global scales; transitions between physical sites (accommodating the museum's move), and very importantly, between physical and electronically mediated or enhanced experiences. This museum innovates not only in the content it displays but in the form of those displays as well. It has pioneered the use of webcasting and regularly sends its exhibit prototypes out to other science museums in the world, acting as a learning network. Hence the transitions at hand engage physical site, but are comprised of non-physical parts as well.

Learning and Architectural Practice

A luxurious aspect to our studio is that we will be working on a real project with a real client. While - alas - the Exploratorium has not hired the CCA class to design its new building, we nevertheless will benefit from meaningful site visits, a trove of historical documentation, and meetings with the museum's curators and administrators.

These conditions are rare in that we will enjoy an architectural problem that is highly conceptually challenging, and yet we can root our actions in learning and re-exploring some basics of architectural practice as well, such as analysis of site and development of program documents.

Students may also be collaborating and sharing their work through a studio-wide wiki, an online tool that is particularly interesting to us since it can also be a tool for thinking about how the Exploratorium's architectural programs are affected by the advent of such things as wikis and webcasts.

Goals of the studio

Most essentially, the studio, like its client, is about learning itself.

Our work is less focused on this single building and the highly complex programs it houses, and more concerned with the invisible systems that glue it all together: education, politics, art, and public to name a few.

• Introduce concepts of phenomenology and the study of human perception
• Investigate different relations between architecture and the sciences
• Study some earlier models of the science museum as programmatic and architectural constructs

This semester, we aim to design by heuristics: learning by doing through hands-on exercises, synthesis, and analysis; to engage the creative process though active learning, discovery, and reflection. We may also make reference to a related philosophical inquiry known as heuretics.

Final Work

Our semester will conclude with proposals for the staging of the museum's move; for an architecture to house the museum at its new site; for a programming document to graphically frame and plan the building's relation to a curatorial strategy; and a kiosk or exhibit prototype that conveys all this in physical and electronic media.