(continued)

This separation of the overall program for Exploration Place creates a dialectic between the two buildings, which urbanistic connections attempt to resolve: axes, bridges, decks, corridors, plazas, concourses, and screen walls.

The parti of two connected buildings and their connective elements allow permeability and a remarkable degree of public space. The walk along the shoreline for pedestrians and cyclists continues through the buildings.

The landscape scheme by Hargreaves Associates extends this theme, creating many public spaces including picnic and play areas. The soil excavated to create the island is remade into earth forms of simple geometries to complement those of the buildings: mounds, pyramids, and spirals. A wetland habitat as a learning exhibit is also designed among the earth forms.

The building volumes are basic rectilinear and curved geometric forms of exposed poured-in-place concrete walls, with ribbed channels relieving the starkness of concrete.

Unlike many other science centers, where the form takes cues from the program—and tends towards a high-tech aesthetic—the volumes are largely disconnected from the program and exist as shells. This disjunction between the program and the building qualified by expression of basic materials and the use of natural light offers slices of reality in a simulated environment.

The experience is not one of getting immersed in a simulated environment: the connections between the different volumes offer reprieves in terms of expansive and beautiful views of the river.

The buildings, generated out of simple geometries in plan, are more complex in section. The roof structures, supported by laminated wood beams and a mill deck structure, are generated by complementary toroids (which can be understood as the surface of a doughnut).

The vaulted roof of the land building, a section of a toroid with its center deep in the earth, is supported by beams that arch in compression. The concave roof of the island building, supported by beams suspended in tension, has its center in the sky.

The toroidal roofs are radial rather than orthogonal, and they introduce a high level of complexity as they cap off the geometric volumes. Resolving the small irregularities in plan cause a roof to extend its swoop and invoke analogies of biological form.

The concave roof of the island building offers the intriguing form as it gathers the edges of the building in a unifying pull upward to the sky. The building in the water seems to be suspended between its upward bound roof and its reflection.

Safdie himself says of this form: "From the outset we sought to evoke the building's purpose—a museum for the exploration of science. As a counterpoint to the flat prairie terrain, the building's skyline gives it its unique character."

Located on a gentle curve that follows the river's edge, the island building swings into view in its entirety on its short axis from the Seneca Bridge. The almost symmetrical roof form rising at the ends to meet the walls invokes the metaphor of a ship moored to the river's edge.

Absent a single dominating form, the scale of the discrete volumes enables the roofs to endow a quirky quality to each. In this aspect, it resembles some of the work of the late John Hejduk: independent objects laid out with a clear familial relation to each other, with the capacity to generate stories, perhaps operating autonomously of its program. The syncretism of conflicting geometries produces the idiosyncratic.

Exploration Place is a city in itself; one of the most popular exhibits, "Kansas in Miniature" reproduces portions of townscapes and farms of Kansas. The reflecting pond and earthworks such as the pyramid and wetlands, are miniatures, mimetic versions of the hill and river. The landscape elements consisting of mounds, bridges and ramps have a dream-like softness.

The apparent success of Exploration Place, judging by the enormous popularity and civic pride it has inspired in the city—it is also counted on to generate the development of the river front—has rendered its architecture iconic status in the public imagination.

At Exploration Place, the drama of the idiosyncratic forms gathering the prairie skies against changing hues in the late light reflecting in the river belongs to the realm of dreams.

Ganesh Nayak is a project designer in the firm of Charles F. McAfee, FAIA, NOMA, PA, Wichita, Kansas.

A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2000 issue of 34 Architecture Review.

The river facade of Exploration Place in Wichita, Kansas, by Moshe Safdie and Associates. Photo: Timothy Hursley The main floor plans of the land building (left) and the island building (right). Image: Moshe Safdie and Associates Bridges, decks, plazas, and concourses create urbanistic connections within the site. Photo: Timothy Hursley A pond formed by weirs to hold back high water separates the two buildings. Photo: Timothy Hursley The success of Exploration Place is apparent in its popularity and the civic pride it has inspired. Photo: Timothy Hursley The roofs are supported by laminated wood beams and a mill deck structure. Photo: Timothy Hursley Safdie's early sketch of the science center on the river. Image: Moshe Safdie and Associates Preliminary design sketches show the geometric ideas that molded the roof forms. Image: Moshe Safdie and Associates   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.