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New Exploratorium Showcases Maps and Views of San Francisco Bay

Photo: The Exploratorium

The Bay Observatory gallery at the newly re-opened Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco features floor to ceiling windows with fantastic views of the city and the bay. It also features a collection of maps, atlases, and interactive exhibits that encourage visitors to connect what they see outside to the geological, meteorological, and human forces that shaped it.

The 330,000 square foot, $300 million museum at Pier 15 is roughly halfway between the Bay Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf.

A visitor to this spot in 1853 would have had to come by boat. In the rowdy days of the Gold Rush, the city’s waterfront still followed the natural contours of the bay, which extended west nearly to the current site of the iconic Transamerica Pyramid.

In one exhibit, along a window with a view of the Transamerica building, a light box shows the original waterfront in green, and a set of transparencies that can be laid on top show how the waterfront filled in and smoothed out as the city grew.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

“This one is my favorite,” said Sebastian Martin, a scientific content developer who worked on the gallery. He places a transparency with more than a dozen symbols, each marking the spot of a sunken ship. Many of these boats brought gold-hungry prospectors to the city in the 19th century, only to be sunk, buried, and paved over as the city grew.

“They just became part of the debris,” said Susan Schwartzenberg, the gallery curator. “Some of them are still filled with stuff from the 19th century.”

A nearby table is piled with printed maps, from giant reproductions of 19th century maps from the U.S. Coast Survey (the nation’s oldest scientific organization, founded in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson) to stylized modern works like Stamen design’s map of private bus routes that ferry tech workers from San Francisco to and from their jobs in Silicon Valley.

An exhibit designed by artist and cartographer Eric Fischer uses light projected onto a raised relief maps to cycle through several dynamic views of the modern city gleaned from social media. In one cycle, blue dots representing Tweets light up downtown during the work day then dissipate through the city at night. In another, green dots represent photos posted to Flickr. The dots flicker mostly around the waterfront and a handful of landmarks, but every once in a while a green streak shoots across the bay — a ferry full of tourists heading to Alcatraz or Sausalito.

The most impressive exhibit, though, is a table-sized raised-relief map of San Francisco Bay (see photo at top). Carved from two blocks of maple with a computerized router and painted white, it is a canvas for data.

One mode shows 40 years of earthquake history compressed into a few minutes, with ripples of projected light going off like little bombs along the Hayward and San Andreas faults. Another shows color-coded salinity levels in the bay, which appears to inhale and exhale with the tides.

Another mode, based on demographic data, allows users to see where people of a given age or ethnicity (as self-reported to the Census Bureau) live. Eric Socolofsky, a new media exhibit developer, sets it up to show population as a function of age. As he starts the age counter, white dots appear all over the map. But patterns soon start to emerge.

Many infants are born in San Francisco, but toddlers move out of the city (presumably with their parents) and into the suburbs. Then, when the age counter hits 18, several big white dots suddenly appear, marking the region’s colleges and universities. In the mid-20s, there’s a growing blob of white in downtown San Francisco, where many young adults go to work and live. It gradually dissipates and spreads to the suburbs as the years go by.

The beauty of the exhibit is that it can display any data the developers find.

Socolofsky says the group is considering several other displays, including one that would show how rising sea levels would affect the Bay Area. But he says one of the most common requests the team has gotten from visitors is to map another seemingly inexorable force: the rising price of real estate.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired