Particle physicist and professor Frank Oppenheimer opened San Francisco’s Exploratorium in 1969 to little fanfare. His vision to provide fun and accessible science education for all ages culminated in this hands-on museum that soon would be regarded as one of the world’s most exciting public learning laboratories, allowing visitors to experiment with science, art and human perception.
By the 1980s, the Exploratorium’s 89,000-square-foot home, the Palace of Fine Arts, which was constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, was no longer large enough to hold the museum’s expanding collections, not to mention it had no heating, air conditioning or ventilation. In addition, its location in a residential neighborhood disconnected the museum from the city. Street reconstruction in 2011 eliminated the Exploratorium’s parking lot, further cutting off its opportunities for visitors and forcing administrators to finally look for a new home.
Working with architectural firm EHDD, San Francisco, a number of potential sites were studied. The Port of San Francisco suggested museum administrators consider piers 15 and 17, which are next to each other on the Embarcadero that lines San Francisco Bay’s eastern waterfront. “We really saw the site’s potential and its location—six minutes from the Ferry Building [which features a gourmet marketplace and city offices], 10 minutes from the Embarcadero BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] Station and 15 minutes from Fisherman’s Wharf [a popular tourist attraction]—couldn’t be beat,” recalls Dennis Bartels, the Exploratorium’s executive director. “We knew we could feed off the spirit and energy of being so close to the center of action.”
Despite administrators’ excitement about housing the Exploratorium in Pier 15 and using Pier 17 as a warehouse, the eight-year design and construction process was not without challenges. The greatest fear of Marc L’Italien, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C, EHDD’s design principal for the Exploratorium, was overdesigning the new space. “The Exploratorium is a beloved San Francisco institution and people associate it with the Palace of Fine Arts,” he says. “My biggest fear was we would design this great new state-of-the-art museum in this great location but that we would have gone one step too far and people would say, ‘It’s a nice new building, but it’s not the Exploratorium; it has lost the essence of what the Exploratorium is all about.’”
Through a very strategic design and construction process that maintained the Palace of Fine Arts’ atmosphere of a “tinkering workshop”
and by creating exhibits that take advantage of the new waterfront location, including one that showcases bay water as part of the building’s mechanical equipment, the new Exploratorium at Pier 15 has integrated its experimental ethos into the building itself.
City Connection
Having once been a bustling transportation hub, the Embarcadero, meaning “the place to embark” in Spanish, began declining in the late 1930s after the Bay Bridge was built and ferries fell out of favor. When container shipping to Oakland, Calif., became the preferred mode for transporting goods and the elevated Embarcadero Freeway was built in the 1960s, literally separating the city from its waterfront, the piers were all but forgotten. However, in 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake badly damaged the Embarcadero Freeway and it was torn down two years later, leading to massive redevelopment of the historic waterfront. The city of San Francisco kicked off the area’s revitalization in 2002 by refurbishing the Ferry Building to its original 1898 ambiance. Then, the Port of San Francisco began offering long-term leases so the piers could be retrofitted into restaurants, retail establishments, office space and more.