Sharks, swamps and more at new Miami science museum
MIAMI — For decades, South Florida schoolchildren and adults fascinated by far-off galaxies, earthly ecosystems, the properties of light and sound and other wonders of science had only a quaint, antiquated museum here in which to explore their interests.
Now, with the longdelayed opening of a vast new science museum downtown set for Monday, visitors will be able to stand underneath a suspended, 500,000-gallon aquarium tank and gaze at hammerhead and tiger sharks, mahi mahi, devil rays and other creatures through a 60,000pound oculus, a lens that will give the impression of seeing the fish from the bottom of a huge cocktail glass. And that’s just one of many attractions and exhibits.
Officials at the $305 million Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science promise it will be a vivid expression of modern scientific inquiry and exposition. Its opening follows a series of setbacks and lawsuits and a scramble to finish the 250,000-squarefoot structure. At one point, the project ran precariously short of money.
The museum’s highprofile opening is especially significant in a state imperiled by rising sea levels and overseen by a governor, Rick Scott, who has said he is unconvinced climate change and global warming are real and whose administration is widely reported to have set an unwritten policy that state agencies refrain from using the terms.
“The problem is not that people don’t believe in science, but that they pick and choose which science they want to believe,” Frank Steslow, a microbiologist appointed a year ago as the museum’s president, said on a recent morning while walking around the four-acre site. “I don’t know that we need to do anything other than be who we are and present the facts and be a resource for everybody.”
As workers swarmed over the site — near the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts — Steslow pointed to interactive exhibits about the fragile South Florida ecosystem, including one on the vast but shrinking Everglades wetlands, and the varied animal species, many of them endangered, that call the region home.
A 250-seat planetarium, its imposing orb visible to passers-by on Biscayne Boulevard, will treat visitors to what the museum calls “a dazzling visual journey” to outer space, the ocean depths or inside the human body on a huge domed screen tilted forward at 23.5 degrees so that images move across a viewer’s entire field of vision.
As part of the museum’s emphasis on tactile experiences, Steslow said, and to highlight the area’s natural ties to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, visitors will be invited to peer into an aquarium tank through a periscopelike contraption that will give them the perspective of a shark hunting for food. They will also be able to touch live urchins, sea stars and mollusks. Three-dimensional “capture cameras” will track people’s movements so that a visitor’s hand, swept across a wall-size screen, will scatter schools of fish projected onto it.
Exhibits include a freeflight aviary and a live coral collection. Others will showcase the science behind the solar system, the physics of lasers, and the history and execution of flight, from the earliest flying reptiles to space exploration and the modern airplane.
To cover its expected annual operating costs of $20.7 million, including paying a staff of 150 people, the Frost museum must attract 725,000 visitors a year, an estimate officials hope to exceed, said Paola Villanueva, a museum spokeswoman.
The project’s financial footing, though, has been rocky for years. In 2015 and last year, fundraising was so underwhelming that almost the entire board of trustees was fired.
Phillip and Patricia Frost, whose wealth comes mainly from pharmaceuticals and whose names already adorn buildings at the University of Miami and Florida International University, initially gave $35 million toward the science museum and converted a loan guarantee for $10 million to a gift in 2015 when the project’s finances went awry.
“I never thought it would go off the road, but of course we were concerned because they had got to the point where the path forward was not clear,” Phillip Frost said in a telephone interview. “The county came to the rescue and we were able to pitch in a bit.”
Over the course of the museum’s design and construction, Miami-Dade County provided $205 million — some of it as part of a general obligation bond — to enable the project’s completion. Private donations and sponsorships provided most of the rest. Museum officials hope to attract an additional $50 million from naming rights to parts of the facility, which was designed by the British architect Nicholas Grimshaw.
From Frost’s point of view, the museum was almost too large an enterprise to succeed without pain.
“Through no fault of their own, the people who conceived of it originally were not experienced enough in the area to realize how complex an undertaking it was,” Frost said. “They might have gone for a less complicated version of the museum, which would have been fine as well. But we have this magnificent institution now and it’s up to the community to support it.”