| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Here At the Academy The Once and
You've decided to take refuge from the urban jungle with a trip to Golden Gate Park, only to step inside the front door of the California Academy of Sciences and into a real, living jungle. Imagine, instead of the airy portico that now greets visitors, a floor-to-ceiling rainforest flooded by natural light. Green iguanas perch on branches over the simulated river, displaying bright orange dewlaps. Monkeys chatter in the canopy high overhead. Children clamber over flaring, buttressed roots of tropical trees, watching a trail of leafcutter ants travel inside a transparent tube. Sure, it's just an idea, but that's part of the charge for Loren Behr, the Academy's Director of Public Programs. As the Academy moves into the new millennium, Behr will be envisaging ways for the museum to captivate the imaginations of old and new audiences while fulfilling its educational goals. A native of Chicago, where museums loom large in the culture, Behr fondly recalls childhood trips to the city's natural history and science museums. "I was really taken with the Egyptology displays at the Field Museum," he says. "That was magical to me. You could transport yourself to another time and place." Before arriving at the Academy in 1995, Behr supervised the creation of exhibits at the Denver and Chicago Children's Museums as well as the Eureka! children's museum in Halifax, Yorkshire, the first to open in the United Kingdom. Many techniques pioneered by children's museums, says Behr, including a focus on visitor needs and exhibits geared toward hands-on, participatory learning, have become industry standard in all kinds of museums. Buzzwords like "interactive" and "immersive" get tossed around freely by museum professionals these days, but Behr sees his challenge as finding the best way to approach a particular subject and help visitors learn about it. One of the high points Behr had in creating the new children's museum in his hometown was the chance to conceive an exhibit about water. Hearing his description, it's not surprising that this has become the museum's most popular exhibit. Visitors don raincoats and get their hands wet building a dam or a decorative fountain, drawing water from a traditional African well, turning a water wheel, or opening locks on the constantly moving waterway that runs throughout the exhibit and connects its various parts. "It's really investigating water from a visceral point of view," says Behr. "It's literally immersive." What's more, it covers natural, physical, and cultural aspects of a complex topic. An idea that has yet to move beyond Behr's head would adapt the Chicago water exhibit to immerse future Academy visitors in the integral subject of watersheds. Behr has considered converting the central Whale Court into an open-air habitat where people might manipulate rivers, dams, and slopes to discover the natural course of water and the impact of changes to that cycle on landscapes, animals, and themselves. Behr tells his students in John F. Kennedy University's museum studies program that exhibits are just another medium for communicating information, but sticking people into new and strange environments, however realistic, and expecting them to soak up knowledge isn't enough. "The museum experience is first and foremost a social experience," he says, "and we haven't designed museums and exhibits with that in mind." So Behr thinks the next-generation Academy could employ more live facilitators to help visitors make connections and to guide their exhibit experience. Part of Behr's charge will be striving to integrate the Academy's three realms of interest—earth, ocean, and space—into a single, satisfying whole. Instead of having specific halls for mammals and birds or different places, new exhibits should deal with the intricacies of systems. It's true that the theme of evolution underpins all of the Academy's activities, but, says Behr, "In thinking of a museum experience, nobody says, ‘I think I'll go learn more about evolution today.'" An example under discussion is to focus Academy coverage of astronomy on astrobiology, the search for past and present life on other worlds and for chemical conditions that are similar to those which allowed life to arise on Earth. Behr agrees with another popular trend, the constantly changing museum. But he'd prefer to find ways to vary visitors' museum experiences each time, short of an array of costly and cumbersome temporary exhibits that alter the physical museum. One thing that won't change is the Academy's reliance on natural and cultural objects, which have fascinated museumgoers since the first cabinets of curiosities. In fact, Behr hopes to see more of the Academy's collections put on display. Twenty years from now, Behr wants the Academy to be people's first choice for answering their specific and broad questions about the natural world, as well as an exciting social destination, rich and flexible enough to provide the curious with ample opportunities to explore and to create the sort of experiences that inspire a lifetime of interest.
Blake Edgar is Senior Editor of California Wild. |
Winter 2000
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