Steel in the News
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Posted by Tasha Weiss on April 13, 2012 at 4:18 PM.
The New Children’s Museum in San Diego offers a unique learning environment for kids and families–including its infrastructure. The building’s exposed structural materials and open spaces foster creativity and education while providing a great lesson on how architectural and structural elements work together in harmony. (Click on the photo to see an outside view of the project.) Photo: Geoff Weisenberger
The school year is almost over, but learning continues at the New Children’s Museum, located in San Diego’s Marina District.
Designed by architect Rob Wellington Quigley, the museum is a three-level, 50,000-sq.-ft series of transparent, flexible spaces that visibly expose the building’s construction and design–inspiring children and families to think, play, and create.
Opened in May 2008, the building contains expansive galleries, open studio environments, and an Arts Education Center that offers various classes and camps. It features interactive art exhibitions such as 33-ft-high wooden Trojan horse sculpture, which visitors can actually go into.
The facility is also one of the first green museums in California. The structure uses environmentally sustainable architecture and construction practices, including recycled building materials, a passive air-handling system, photovoltaic panels, water-saving devices, daylighting and convection cooling.
A few blocks from the building is a park and playground that extends the museum’s exposed structural materials to the outdoors. The open steel structure features swing sets and various laser-cut messages in the roof.
(Check out the laser-cutting precision of one of the roof messages from a creative viewpoint!)
