Projects

Fort Mason

Fort Mason exhibits to be deinstalled July 2015

In 2009, the Exploratorium unveiled its first collection of outdoor exhibits at Fort Mason, a historic military site run by the National Park Service, on San Francisco’s northern waterfront. A highly constructed setting on the edge of a great natural estuary, a place where land and water meet, Fort Mason draws people of many different cultures and interests. The distinct interpretive cultures of the Exploratorium and the National Park Service combined on this project. Merging the interactive approach of a science museum with a parks-based natural history focus, we were able to highlight the intriguing contradictions of the site in a way neither group could have done on its own.

Twenty interactive exhibits were designed to help visitors notice and investigate subtle phenomena and forces at play in this outdoor environment. The exhibits call attention to the complex movement of wind and waves; the interplay of light, shadow, and temperature; and the interaction between natural and built environments. They make use of everyday structures as observational instruments and give a voice to the landscape.

Elements

Bay Model

This highly detailed, animated 3-D model—created by Oliver Fringer, Dan Collins, and Gene Cooper—was located at the old Exploratorium site. It demonstrated the complex dynamics of San Francisco Bay currents and tides.

Bridge Thermometer

A calibrated spotting scope, mounted on a high bluff and trained on the Golden Gate Bridge, allows visitors to see how much the span moves up and down as the structure contracts and expands in response to temperature. Engineered to rise and fall by as much as 16 feet, the span’s daily fluctuations illustrate the power of the subtle forces impinging on the Bridge—and the dynamic nature of monumental structures we normally think of as static.

Corrosion Zones

The marine environment, with its omnipresent salt and moisture, is powerfully corrosive. But corrosion depends on context, and local microenvironments can produce a range of effects. These chain links rust very differently depending on how deeply they are suspended in the Bay. Their copper patinas vary from brown to orange and red to green; in the most corrosive zones, the heavy links actually swell and crack apart.

Fracture Mapping

Bronze icons turn cracks on an asphalt parking lot into a point of departure for understanding how engineered structures respond to a range of environmental forces, including seismic movements, temperature fluctuations, traffic patterns, and architectural loads.

House of Days

A small, historic building becomes a projection space where visitors can see a visual record of changing atmospheric conditions over time. Snapshots of the sky taken at regular intervals merge into a grid of cells that enable visitors to track and compare weather patterns on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Lift

A series of airfoils rise and fall on vertical cables in response to varying wind speeds, graphing the flow of moving air. By observing the airfoils, visitors can see how different the wind rates can be within a relatively small area. The exhibit provides insights into the biomechanics of bird flight in a shoreline environment.

Pier Piling Pivot

This exhibit uses a geared motor to swing a specially designed piling out of the water so that visitors can examine it in detail. An accompanying legend identifies the intertidal zones on the piling and the species of plant and animal life occupying this unique shoreline environment.

Where: This exhibit is not currently on view.

Portable Observatories

Using a modified newsstand design, this exhibit distributed pocket-sized cards that provided taxonomic guides to heighten observation in this unique urban landscape. Topics included plants that colonize the tops of pier pilings, the plumage phases of gulls, and lichen species living on parking lot bollards.

Rust Wedge

Rust is a major issue in waterfront buildings, as water enters cracks in masonry structures and rusts the underlying steel reinforcement. This exhibit shows the expansive force of rusting steel. A piece of iron placed in the cleft of a block of concrete is beginning to rust—it will expand over time and eventually fracture the block.

Where: Koret Foundation Bay Walk

Ship Constellations

At night, the color-coded patterns of marine navigation lights help mariners determine the size, type, and direction of marine craft. This exhibit helps visitors decode these light patterns by using a half-silvered mirror to superimpose images of common ships and boats on the water to clarify their identifying characteristics.

Sky Mirror

The color of the sky varies depending on the density of the atmosphere. Sunlight from the horizon travels through about 38 times more air than light streaming down from the zenith. Sky Mirror allows visitors to compare patches of sky from different altitudes, revealing the surprising range of shades and hues in what often seems a uniformly blue dome.

Sound Ranging

Using a light and bell positioned at a distance, this exhibit enables visitors to investigate how sound perception outdoors can be affected by distance, wind, and temperature. Another aspect of the exhibit allows visitors to use their cell phones to measure the time it takes the sound of a Golden Gate Bridge foghorn to reach them in different parts of the city.

Tasting the Tides

At a special low-flow drinking fountain, visitors can taste the varied salt concentrations typical of water flowing from the Delta through the Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Learning how these salinity variations affect aquatic life from plankton to sharks, visitors gain an appreciation of the dynamic complexity of the San Francisco Bay Estuary.

Underground Estuary

The ebb and flow of the tides is a primary factor in changing underground water levels near the Bay. In this exhibit, built over a 25-foot-deep well, the water column moves up and down in synchrony with the tides. A float in the water column drives a chart recorder recording the past month’s groundwater levels.

Wave Tracer

In this exhibit, a loose pier piling becomes an instrument for demonstrating the complex hydraulic forces converging on pier structures in the Bay. A stylus attached to the oscillating piling graphs the patterns of surrounding waves, currents, and tidal flows in a constantly-changing sand tracing.

Wind Arrows

Wind indicators from a sailboat, mounted on a flagpole at one-foot intervals, illustrate how the laminar flow of wind changes with height. Along San Francisco’s shoreline, a difference of only 20 feet in altitude may mean a 90-degree difference in the wind’s direction.