An Emphasis on Newton’s Laws (and a Little Lawlessness)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/arts/design/the-new-exploratorium-opens-in-san-francisco.html

Version 0 of 1.

SAN FRANCISCO — During the years after the Exploratorium opened in 1969 in the ramshackle Palace of Fine Arts here, did it ever think that the world had passed it by? At first, it was a countercultural revelation to start a science museum in which every visitor was treated like a chalk-smeared genius carrying out experiments. There were no objects in display cases, no signs saying, “Don’t touch.” Every exhibit was handmade on site and was meant to look it.

Since then, so much has changed. Interactivity in museums has become the rule. Science centers have proliferated. And, according to the Exploratorium, 80 percent of them “use Exploratorium exhibits, programs or ideas.” But they have also gone much further. Science centers are now engines of economic development, incorporating enormous Imax theaters into immense, environmentally savvy buildings, loudly proclaiming pop attractions and effects-laden displays.

Having influenced such a development, would the Exploratorium now be influenced in turn? It might have seemed that way when the Exploratorium announced that it was planning to move to Piers 15 and 17 along the Embarcadero, between the tourist meccas of Fisherman’s Wharf and the Ferry Building.

The new location would allow double the museum’s annual half-million visitors. It would triple display space to 330,000 square feet. The new $220 million building, designed by EHDD architects, would be the length of three football fields. It would feature a fine restaurant overlooking the bay. It would set a goal of producing as much energy as it consumed, using bay water for heating and cooling, and solar panels for power. But was there anyone who cared for the old place who was not just a little nervous about what might be lost?

No need. The new home, with all of those characteristics (and a 200-seat cabaret), is opening on Wednesday, and while it doesn’t deserve unalloyed acclaim, the achievement is remarkable. Under its executive director, Dennis Bartels, the Exploratorium has preserved and expanded what it was when the physicist Frank Oppenheimer created it. It remains the most important science museum to have opened since the mid-20th century because of the nature of its exhibits, its wide-ranging influence and its sophisticated teacher training program.

Yet the new Exploratorium remains eccentrically original. Technology is scarce. There are few video screens. There are fewer computers. There are circuits but no evident circuit boards. Woodworking and metalworking take place on the museum floor. There are more than 600 exhibits, but the emphasis remains on the laws of physics and motion, elementary principles of perception, and elegantly designed machines that conceal nothing.

You can still play with pendulums that were designed for the museum’s original opening. You can spin disks atop a whirling wheel; you can try to get a bicycle’s pedals to move using a sequence of buttons; you can gaze at the physicality of inverted reflections created by a finely polished parabolic mirror; you can position toy robots to create spinning animations.

And while Rob Semper, the director of programs, and Thomas Rockwell, the director of exhibits, have guided the Exploratorium into new areas inspired by the new setting, including a handsome glass-enclosed “observatory” offering a panoramic view of the bay; expanded its biological displays to include extensive details about plankton and plant life; and extended its terrain further into the social sciences, the museum remains as Oppenheimer first envisioned it: a playground of science and perception.

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. But this is totally counter to the Exploratorium’s ambitions. Here, sufficiently well-understood science has nothing magical about it. Science is comprehended not through abstract principles but through concrete experience. It is revealed not through speculation but through manipulation. You learn by exploring.

Expectations for the new material, then, are high. The setting is dramatic, and 1.5 acres of public space surround Pier 15. (The museum eventually plans to expand into the adjacent Pier 17.) A series of free outdoor exhibitions also gives some sense of the museum’s character. A “Rickshaw Obscura” allows visitors to climb inside a dark chamber mounted on a bicycle cart to see an upside-down outdoor vista projected against a wall; the image, produced by a pinhole, demonstrates the workings of a classic camera obscura.

Another effective display: a 150-foot-long bridge between the piers has been temporarily outfitted by the artist Fujiko Nakaya with almost 900 jets from which fog is occasionally propelled, creating an immersive mist; it is eerily provocative, emerging in midday sunlight.

But not everything is as inspired. The pier also contains four large transparent discs filled with water and samples of gravel and sand from the bay. Turn the discs, and swirling waves demonstrate the underwater motion of sediment. The results are not particularly revealing or engrossing.

And while it is intriguing to see projections on a 3-D relief model of the bay showing, say, changing salinity levels, this is routine science center stuff, offering none of the Exploratorium’s participatory playfulness. The extensive explorations of plankton life could also appear nearly anywhere.

Most important, the expansion into some realms seems premature. A temporary exhibition, “The Changing Face of What Is Normal: Mental Health,” is mounted in the new gallery of human behavior. It includes the personal effects of patients from Willard Psychiatric Center in New York State, which was decommissioned in 1995. The show is partly pegged to the release of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The exhibition, we are told, “explores the notion that normal is a subjective, dynamic, socially driven idea.”

We are clearly meant to find the institution unpleasant: artifacts are closed in behind chicken wire, and a reproduction of a Utica Crib — a wooden, body-long restraint — suggests one “treatment” used. We also seem to be expected to find some comfort in an apparently more enlightened contemporary vision of normality.

But many of the case histories lead in other directions. Lawrence M., an Austrian immigrant born in 1878, was hospitalized at Willard as a manic depressive for much of his life. But he apparently grew to live in contentment as the hospital’s gravedigger and was described in 1965 as “a well-liked, hard-working, quite original old man.”

Frank C., a West Virginian, was discharged from the Army in 1942 because of his “mental condition” and was diagnosed with “dementia praecox.” But today, we are told (without real explanation), his case suggests that “he may also have been deeply affected by racism, isolation, poverty and perhaps uncertainty about his sexual orientation” — which here seems a bit like a list of contemporary diagnostic formulas.

We emerge from this exhibition saddened by the artifacts and the lives, but without any coherent interpretation or insight. The show seems incomplete and overly manipulative.

Perhaps the Exploratorium also overextended itself. It is not, after all, really a science center, obliged to survey fields of knowledge. Many disciplines — computer science, particle physics, medicine, genetics, the history of science — have little place here. And exhibits become uninspiring when they deliver information instead of spurring investigation. Look instead at two recently released free Exploratorium apps for iPads, one dealing with sound, the other with color. They show with compact simplicity how even commonplace sensations become sources of insight. Or look at the Exploratorium itself: drink deep from the water fountain shaped like a toilet. Sit in a chair holding a spinning bicycle wheel. See whether you and three other visitors with incomplete controls can collaborate on a game of Pac-Man. Wear a set of headphones that seems to swap your right and left ears. Climb into a kaleidoscope.

Perhaps any sufficiently simple principle, if vividly experienced, really is indistinguishable from magic.