Exhibits at the California Academy of Sciences
by Leslie Wolke on May 6th, 2009
In January, I had the pleasure of touring the tremendous exhibits at the California Academy of Sciences. I interviewed the designers of the exhibits as well as their peers at the Academy for an article that has just been published in segdDesign, the quarterly magazine of the SEGD. Here’s a bit from the introduction:
Imagine receiving the following creative brief:
“Collaborate with a Pritzker Prize winning architect, evolutionary biologists and ecologists, and the staff of a 157-year-old acclaimed research institution to create a new generation of sustainable exhibition design for a space bathed in natural light and without walls, in the middle of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.”
This was the challenge that brought together Jonathan Katz, founder and CEO of Cinnabar, a Los Angeles-based production and fabrication company, and Adam Brodsley, principal and co-founder of Volume Inc., a multi-disciplinary design studio in San Francisco. Katz, Brodsley, and a bevy of designers and exhibit specialists produced two main attractions for the new home of the California Academy of Sciences, the 412,000-sq.-ft. LEED Platinum museum that is transforming the definition of that word by its very being.
If you would like to read the article, download the pdf and post your thoughts below. (Above is a photo of a great quote from one of the exhibits – couldn’t find a way to work it into the article!)