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So, I was looking for something to do with the kids yesterday, and we decided to take the 90 minute trip over to SF to visit the new California Academy of Sciences. I've been going there as long as I can remember, but "economy" issues over the last couple of years have kept me from visiting the new Academy since the rebuild. I've been looking forward to seeing the new Academy for a while, and based on the photos, I was prepared to be wowed.
I wasn't.
I mean, when you walk in, the place looks impressive. The open and airy glass and concrete architecture looks modern and beautiful, and the glass rainforest sphere is jawdropping, but once you get past that, you suddenly realize how SMALL and cheap the whole place feels. Exhibits that would have once been placed in halls now simply occupy divider frames on a concrete floor. The whole place has a "cram the exhibits into the empty spaces" feel. A tour of the entire facility, which once took the better part of the day, can now be accomplished in under two hours...and that includes watching the planetarium show.
And that planetarium! Once I heard "worlds largest all-digital planetarium", there was no chance that I was going to visit the Academy without seeing it. When I walked in and saw the gracefully lit overhead screen, I knew this was going to be great. I walked out wondering "what were they thinking??!?" The digital projecters weren't up to the task, so galaxies were washed out and highly pixelated like an over-zoomed digital photo. The color contrast was murky, so it was often hard to make out exactly what they were showing. The projector refresh rates were terrible, so motion across the screen was often stuttering. And, to make everything worse, they put the brightest emergency "EXIT" lights they could find in four corners of the room, which cast a pale green light over the entire screen and turned the inky black sky into an odd greenish gray. Didn't anyone actually TEST this?
All in all, I actually DID like the museum, but it wasn't worth anywhere near the $125 that it cost to get my wife, kids, and foster child into the building. I walked out thinking that the renovation had transformed one of the greatest science museums on the west coast into "just another municipal museum", suitable for schoolbus trips and day trips for San Franciscans, but that's about it. I walked out thinking that, now that I'd seen it, I probably wouldn't be back. That's tragic, since I'd been to the old Academy a dozen times and never got tired of seeing it.
The old Academy was designed to spark an interest in science in our youth. It was designed to pull them in, and wow them with science, and ignite their curiosity in the world around them. The new one? It's just a handful of dry exhibits stuck into a big concrete room with the build-quality of your average warehouse store. The designers, it seems, got so caught up with the idea of putting together a "modern, green building" that they forgot that it's the items INSIDE the building that are really important.
I really thought it was just me, and I kept my opinions to myself, but when we got back into the car both my 16 year old and my 13 year old started talking about how much "better" the old one was. Even worse, my 6 year old said to me, "Daddy, can we go to the zoo next time? That was boring." At 6 the old Academy NEVER bored me.
Tragic.
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