Patrick Kociolek, became its interim director. A
researcher accustomed to approaching problems
through data, Kociolek wanted to test the hypothesis that the planned upgrade was really in the
museum’s best interests. “I said to the board, ‘Why
don’t we step back and, instead of being driven
by the facilities, ask ourselves: What’s a natural
history museum in the twenty-first century?’” he
recalls. “I had no idea this naive question would
lead us so far.”
And so the Academy—the only museum in the
country to combine a natural history collection
with a planetarium and an aquarium in one
building—spent a year and a half studying the role
of the science museum in contemporary culture.
As Kociolek, who recently left the Academy to
become the director of the University of Colorado
Museum of Natural History, puts it: “How do you
take this Victorian-era model and concept and
make it relevant?”
First, the museum analyzed 20 years of attendance data and found a dramatic but consistent
decrease. Then it crunched more numbers and
realized that other science museums across the
country were doing even worse. To confirm some
suspicions about the state of scientific knowledge
in the community, it commissioned a poll with
Harris Interactive. As suspected, it showed that
while science is a bigger part of our lives than ever
before the public’s understanding of it is lower than
it was a generation ago.
The bright spot in all this gloomy news came
from an unlikely collaborator: Paul Ray, the demographer who helped coin the term “Cultural Creatives.” In 2001 the Academy hired him to study
potential visitors to the museum. Ray’s data showed
that science, conservation, and education about
nature were important values to large groups of
people around the country and crossed political,
ethnic, and socioeconomical boundaries. In other
words, the need and desire for science education
were great, but the existing paradigm, the Victorian
cabinet of curiosities, was not up to the task.
“The old model of the natural history museum is
the search for eternal truths,” Kociolek says, referring to traditional exhibits such as dioramas, which
PROGRAM
A Piano drawing mapping out the
relationships between the proposed
building, the park, and the orientation of the sun.
3
14
FLOOR LEVEL
2
13
8
5
6
7
2
Piazza
3
4
Top sketch, courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop; exploded diagram, Amelia Hall; floor plan, courtesy Arup
GROUND LEVEL
1
Main entrance
Store
Café
5
LO WER LEVEL
2
9
10
11
12
Above: An exploded diagram of the
main program elements and their
organization in the building. Below:
The plan of the ground floor.
1. African Hall
2. Morrison Planetarium
3. Rainforests of the World
4. West Exhibit Hall
5. The Swamp
6. Foucault Pendulum
7. East Exhibit Hall
8. Early Explorers Cove
9. Philippine Coral Reef
10. Water Planet
11. California Coast
12. Amazon Flooded Forest
13. Naturalist Center
14. Observation Terrace
“This was a magic place
in Golden Gate Park,”
Piano recalls. “I said, ‘The
roof has got to be part of
the building experience.’”
Rainforests
of the World
