Outdoor Exploratorium Exhibits
Selected Overview

A new Outdoor Exploratorium features a collection of 20 brand-new outdoor interactive artful science exhibits. Visitors can find the Outdoor Exploratorium at Fort Mason between San Francisco’s Aquatic Park and the Marina District, beginning on March 13, 2009.

Bridge Thermometer
A San Francisco icon, the Golden Gate Bridge is a dynamic structure continuously responding to heat, moisture, traffic, and wind. In fact, temperature affects the bridge in dramatic ways: The span is engineered to move up and down in a sixteen-foot range in response to thermal expansion and contraction of the suspension cables.

The Bridge Thermometer exhibit allows visitors to view the Golden Gate Bridge through a calibrated telescope that illustrates the changing height of the span as it responds to temperature fluctuations and traffic loads.

Location: Upper Fort Mason, Golden Gate Bridge Overlook on McDowell Road, Adjacent to Black Point Battery

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Tasting the Tides
Salinity plays a critical role in both the human body and the San Francisco Bay estuary. Without the dissolved salts of our body fluids, our nerves could not conduct the electrochemical impulses basic to our lives. In the estuary, salinity levels fluctuate dramatically according to tides, currents, location, and season, playing a key role in defining the range and habitat of countless freshwater and marine organisms.

Using special low-flow drinking fountains, Tasting the Tides allows visitors to taste a varied range of salt concentrations typical of water flowing from the Delta through the Bay estuary to the Pacific Ocean. Although the water is not drawn from San Francisco Bay, its salinity varies dramatically — as does the Bay’s. A fully accessible, low-profile interlocking floor map provides an armature for exploration and comparison.

Location: Fort Mason Center, View Plaza between Firehouse and Black Point

Wind Arrows
At ground level, wind often seems to flow in fairly unified streams without much variation in direction at different heights. But in actuality, wind is highly stratified, with vertical layers often blowing at right angles to one another across short vertical distances.

Using sailboat wind indicators arranged at regular intervals on a vertical pole, Wind Arrows reveals the complex wind stratification patterns of the San Francisco Bay shoreline. Interpretive graphics encourage visitors to transfer their observations from Wind Arrows to the adjacent urbanskyline. By comparing the directions of waving flags at different heights and locations along Hyde Street Pier, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Aquatic Park, the surrounding urban architecture reveals itself as a large-scale wind observatory.

Location: Upper Fort Mason, East Entrance at McDowell Road, Across from Pier 4

Wave Oscilloscope
The loose fender pier pilings lining the east pier apron of the Festival Pavilion are remarkable instruments for demonstrating the complex forces converging on pier structures through the interplay of tides, currents, and waves.

The Wave Oscilloscope exhibit attaches a stylus to a moving pier piling, allowing visitors to see a graphic record of the piling’s oscillations in a bed of sand. This exhibit thus illustrates the subtle yet constant interaction between manmade structures and the natural environment.

Location: Fort Mason Center, East Pier Apron, Festival Pavilion

Pier Piling Pivot
The fender pier pilings along Fort Mason Center waterfront support a rich and varied biogeography of intertidal organisms. Unlike tidepools, which are only accessible at low tide, the intertidal life growing on the pilings can only be seen at a distance by visitors looking down from the walkways above.

Pier Piling Pivot uses a geared motor to lift a specially designed piling out of the water so that visitors standing on a pier apron or seawall can closely examine the life it supports. An accompanying graphic legend identifies the intertidal zones on the piling and the various species of plant and animal life occupying this unique environment.

Location: Fort Mason Center Pier Apron, Festival Pavilion

Corrosion Wedge
A major issue in the preservation of historically significant waterfront buildings, spalling occurs when water enters fractures on the surface of a masonry structure and rusts the underlying steel reinforcing material. The Corrosion Wedge exhibit illustrates the spalling phenomenon by embedding a piece of iron in a concrete block, allowing the ensuing rust to slowly fracture the block over time. Since rusting iron increases in volume as it decays, this causes an internal wedging action that forces chunks of concrete from the building surface in irregular patches. Spalls map the areas where the greatest stress is occurring on a building due to dead loads or seismic settling. Spalls most frequently appear above, below, or at the corners of doors and windows.

Location: Fort Mason Center Pier Apron, Festival Pavilion

Lift
The smooth motion of a gull flying between waterfront buildings disguises the complexity of the subtle wing adjustments necessary to navigate the variable winds characteristic of maritime environments. Drawing on the wire-rope rigging technology used in sailboat design, Lift is composed of sets of airfoils on parallel vertical cables. Similar to birds’ wings, the airfoils stacked on each cable rise in sequence according to the speed of the prevailing winds. Arranged in series across an architectural opening, these graceful airfoils graph the often surprising diversity of wind speeds present in a given transect of shoreline.

Location: Fort Mason Center, Between Building A and West Pier Shed

Audio Posts
Most of Fort Mason Center south of the Landmark Buildings is used for parking. Can the south parking lot serve as an interpretive site that enhances visitors’ experiences as well as a utilitarian necessity?

Audio Posts will broadcast site-specific information to the Fort Mason Center parking lot, allowing visitors to use their car radios to hear a set of short audio guides that deepen their experience of the area. For example, one audio post might provide a guide to common fog signals, while another might help visitors distinguish the different types of calls made by the gulls that roost on the pier sheds along the waterfront.

Location: Fort Mason Center, Main Parking Lot

Flow Mapping
Currently, the main pedestrian link between Upper Fort Mason and Fort Mason Center is the masonry staircase at the termination of McDowell Road. Flow Mapping transforms the parking island at the base of this stairway into a site for observing the subtle geological, hydrological, and botanical forces at work in an everyday parking lot.

An unusual “flow map” already exists on the asphalt surface of this urban watershed: The aggregate used in the asphalt paving contains high concentrations of iron ore which appear as comet-shaped rust stains outlining the flow of water through this system. Cracks and fractures in the asphalt caused by vehicle loads, thermal stress, and geological settling combine with these water flows to form habitats for pioneer plants colonizing this challenging urban environment. Flow Mapping uses subtle yet innovative cues to highlight these indicators of natural geographic and meteorological processes.

Location: Fort Mason Center, Southeast Parking Island, Base of Fort Mason Staircase

Bay Model, at the Exploratorium

Created by Stanford engineer Oliver Fringer, and artists Dan Collins and Gene Cooper, this exhibit gives Exploratorium visitors a strong sense of how their actions influence the complex dynamics of the San Francisco Bay Estuary. For example, visitors will be able to place hypothetical pollutants throughout the Bay as visualized on a large horizontal projection screen and then watch their course as affected by levee breaches, winds, tides, river inflow and sea-level rise.

Where to Find the Exhibits

The exhibits of the Outdoor Exploratorium are organized into five groups corresponding to the main visitor circulation paths along the Fort Mason shoreline:

1. Upper Fort Mason — East Entrance / McDowell Road / Black Point Battery

Wind Arrows
Bridge Thermometer

2. Fort Mason Center — Firehouse / Firehouse Cove

Taste the Tides
Wave Oscilloscope

3. Fort Mason Center — Herbst Pavilion and Festival Pavilion Seawall and Pier Aprons

Pier Piling Pivot
Corrosion Wedge

4. Fort Mason Center – Building A and West Pier Shed

Lift

5. Fort Mason Center – West Vehicle Entrance, Main Parking Lot, Fort Mason Steps

Audio Posts
Flow Mapping