“This was a great move for the Exploratorium,” L’Italien notes. “The new site is 9 acres—about three times the size of the former site— and essentially on the front yard of the city with the ability to reach a very different demographic.”
Bartels adds: “The nice thing is Fisherman’s Wharf all the way down to Mission Bay, south of the ballpark, has become a really active pedestrian way. We see 1 million people a month walking past our new front door, and we think that number is going to keep getting bigger. The city is doing a much better job bringing businesses and people back down to the water.”
The design team took advantage of the opportunity to engage passersby. An open plaza between piers 15 and 17 allows the general public to walk all the way to the bay and around the museum. Two dozen outdoor exhibits and art installations are available; many are free.
Bartels notes: “We’ve become sort of a larger part of the daylong experience of people coming in from the outskirts. If visitors don’t spend the whole day here, they can walk to other places in San Francisco. To cap it all off, all these years we were taking Mother Nature and shrinking her down to tabletop size and sharing that phenomenon indoors; we finally get to go outdoors and play with Mother Nature herself.”
Framing the outdoor space is the Fisher Bay Observatory—the only new building in the project. Built at the end of the plaza between the two piers, the ground floor is a restaurant that is open to the general public. The second floor offers more exhibit space with large expanses of high-performance glass that provide views of the bay and toward the city. In addition, the Fisher Bay Observatory is available for evening events, offering a unique venue with the ability to interact with exhibits.
Existing-building Considerations
The team opted to make Pier 15—330,000 square feet—the site of the Exploratorium and maintain Pier 17—112,000 square feet—as storage space. To prepare Pier 15 for assembly occupancy, significant work was done to the substructure. Approximately 5,000 pilings that were heavily damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake support Pier 15. EHDD’s design combined repairs to about 1,200 of the existing piles and insertion of 30 new mega piles that are 6 feet in diameter situated at the four corners of the pier. “These large piles are connected by a structural slab poured over the existing floor,” L’Italien explains. “This diaphragm creates a really stiff platform that can resist lateral earthquake movement.”
Reminiscent of the Palace of Fine Arts, Pier 15’s interior resembles an open industrial space with exposed metal trusses. “I think our architects did a terrific job maintaining the design aesthetic to still feel like a big industrial shed, so people wouldn’t feel like there’s anything too precious here,” Bartels states.