Although the palace had some daylighting, the pier offers ample natural light thanks to clerestory windows and an overhead monitor than runs down the entire pier. Several overhead loading doors along both sides of Pier 15 have been refurbished and continue to serve as loading bays; others have been replaced by high-performance glazing within the existing openings.
Neutral paint colors not only help with daylight reflectance, but also ensure the pier building doesn’t take away from the exhibits themselves. “The way we colored the walls and the structure up above was all in the service of celebrating the historic structure but not having it take center stage,” L’Italien explains. “The design intends for the exhibits to be the main attraction; that’s why people are here. The unified color palette ensures clusters of classrooms and offices recede into the background.”
As L’Italien alludes, classrooms and office spaces were constructed to be like separate buildings within the pier. They are clad in plywood and interspersed throughout the space, so individual galleries could be created between them. “That was really important in terms of visitor orientation and acoustics; it also results in far less reverberation. We can handle much larger crowds and the sound doesn’t get oppressive,” L’Italien adds.
Net-zero Goals
Major goals of the project were to achieve net-zero energy and carbon, but balancing these goals with historic-preservation requirements to ensure the project received historic tax credits created design challenges. Ultimately, L’Italien is happy with the historic mandates. “Even though it was more difficult to deal with thermally, putting insulation in the exterior walls and cladding them on the inside would’ve really destroyed the historic character and it wouldn’t have felt like the tinkering workshop that people know as the Exploratorium,” he says.
The building features a 1.3-megawatt photovoltaic (PV) array, which covers almost 2 acres of the roof. L’Italien says the PV array produces enough energy to power 1,000 American homes during the course of a year and is equivalent to removing 5,900 automobiles from U.S. highways. In addition, 15 percent of rainwater is captured from the roof and used to flush toilets; the rest is filtered and returned to the bay.
Following the Exploratorium’s experimentation philosophy, the project’s location allowed the design team to interpret bay water in unique ways. “Not only do the exhibits use the bay water, but we’re also using the water in the mechanical system to heat and cool the building,” L’Italien notes.
Seawater is brought into the building and run through two titanium heat exchangers where it heats or cools fresh water in an independent loop that then is carried through all the floor slabs. About 73,000 gallons of fresh water per hour move through 40 miles of plastic pipe, which was cast into the floor slab. In addition, about 30 percent of the tubing was laid as pre-manufactured mats. “Laying tubing manually in big warehouse-type spaces is really inefficient and labor intensive,” says Joseph Wenisch, P.E., LEED AP, associate principal with engineering firm Integral Group, Oakland, Calif. “Factory-built mats have the spacing fixed with plastic separators. At the site, all you do is connect the sections to the manifold and then roll out the mats and tie them down.”