It’s a submarine! It’s a giant canoe! No — it’s a science museum, the latest American import, and the first in the Midwest, by superstar Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. Commanding a prime riverfront site in Ohio’s capital and largest city, the $125 million museum, which opened Saturday, is a fine and sometimes exhilarating work of architecture, one that should quash forever the outdated idea that science is only for nerds. It is, however, no aesthetic triumph.
Known by the acronym COSI, which stands for Center of Science & Industry, the museum is a disappointment because it lacks the visual impact of previous Isozaki work, particularly the colorful and poetic Team Disney headquarters in Orlando, Fla. At first glance, one is tempted to term the museum’s oval concrete shell, which stretches 960 feet from end to end and is as long as three city blocks, a dull monolith.
But the building is saved by the qualities that made Isozaki’s reputation: his surehanded grasp of geometry and proportions, his ability to manipulate space and light with dazzling effect and his keen understanding of the role a building plays in the life of a city. This one, which Isosaki shaped in association with the Columbus firms of NBBJ and Moody/Nolan, even manages to say something profound about America.
The site for the museum, on land that juts into the snaking Scioto River, is superb. Directly across the river, to the east, are the corporate skyscrapers and government buildings of downtown Columbus. Many architects would have cleared away a long-vacant, neo-classical high school that already occupied the site. But looking down from one of the skyscrapers, and seeing an endless horizontal plane spreading to the west, Isozaki had another idea.
“My feelings at that moment were about American history,” he says. “I thought of how, years ago, people from the eastern seaboard crossed the Appalachian Mountains, came to the Midwest, and used this space as a base for moving on to the frontier. And some people stayed. They looked back to the east, toward their past, or they looked toward the west and the future. This is the place where those two concepts meet.”
So Isozaki has kept the high school, joining it to the middle of his new building and using it as a takeoff point for a provocative dialogue between past and future. The eastern side of the new building is clad in a dark-blue corrugated metal that forms a backdrop for the high school; it speaks to tradition and memory. The western side is principally sheathed in curving panels of white-gray, precast concrete; it suggests innovation and discovery.
Yet for all the new building looks forward, it never loses sight of the past — specifically, the classical spirit of the old high school. Raised on a mound of grass, approached by an ascending flight of steps and divided into symmetrical parts, the new structure obeys Philip Johnson’s memorable injunction: “You cannot not know history.”
As urban design, COSI isn’t perfect. Seen from the west, across its surface parking lots, it hardly seems graceful, resembling a German U-boat run aground at a shopping mall. But viewed from the east, across the river, its real civic contribution becomes apparent: A new curving swath of parkland, complete with an amphitheater, promises to bring life to the long-dormant banks of the river. Outgoing Columbus Mayor Gregory Lashutka says the building has been a major impetus for improving the city’s waterfront.
As architecture, COSI also is a mixed story. There’s undeniable drama in the museum’s exterior, especially its narrow, curving ends, which seem to slice through space like a Coast Guard cutter. Yet the museum is no match for another Isozaki building that has been compared to a ship, the 8-year-old Team Disney building, whose long, low-slung profile and smokestack-like central drum liken it to an ocean liner.
The Disney building, which houses offices, works not only as a sculptural whole but also as a series of parts that make it seem less imposing than its actual, massive size. Colorful, tumbling cubes surround the drum. And, because it is an office building, it has windows that animate its exterior — something rare at museums because curators don’t want natural light to interfere with their exhibits.
COSI has windows on its eastern side only. The result: As you approach the building from the west, it looks huge.
Isozaki’s design was further undercut because the budget would not allow him to clad COSI in silvery titanium, which would have made its boatlike shape even more sleek and sculptural. Instead, Isozaki had to use the precast concrete panels, each roughly 60 feet high and 10 feet wide.
These panels are dull and foreboding, especially when seen from afar. When one gets closer, however, COSI’s western face becomes more inviting because Isozaki has joined the panels with stainless steel bands that give the building a sense of rhythm and delight. When the sun shines, they form a glinting, curving pattern that COSI’s president, Kathryn Sullivan, nicely likens to a “liquid metal necklace.” A golden drum clad in corrugated metal, which houses a domed theater, further reduces the building’s massiveness.
Step inside and you see that Isozaki’s shiplike shape is not only cosmetic; it forms spaces that are easy to navigate and visually elegant, even though they are finished in relatively inexpensive materials. Imagine a long corridor running the length of a submarine and you will grasp the layout of COSI’s three-level interior. In contrast to the cramped, dark bowels of a ship, however, the museum is spacious and full of light.
A theater for human activity, the skylit main lobby superbly expresses COSI’s philosophy that people learn best about science when they put their bodies right into the experiment. This became clear during a recent members’ preview as museumgoers tried out a feature that is sure to become a trademark of COSI: a unicycle that runs across a steel cable stretched across the main lobby. There is no net below. A counterweight keeps the riders in balance, teaching a dramatic lesson about physics.
The building’s spatial heart, a cube-shaped atrium in back of the cylindrical drum, is meant to be a serene, zen-like space, but it is currently less than inspiring, compromised visually by some clumsy, rolled-down window grates that seal off a staircase from the old high school. But the interplay of the cube and the drum, as experienced from bridges that cut through the main lobby, is superb.
The corridors that lead from the lobby to the exhibits are crisp and handsome, with tall white walls washed by the light emanating from sleek metal fixtures with fluorescent tubes. Exhibit signs add rhythm and a hint of playfulness to the monumental space while windows on the eastern side bring in light and the open the building to skyline views. In a touch sure to be appreciated by fatigued museumgoers, Isozaki placed white oak benches along the windows.
Visitors journey down the corridors to so-called “learning worlds,” sprawling themed exhibits that range in subject matter from the ocean to gadgets — and in design sensibility from sleek and industrial to campy and kitschy. In one, called “Progress,” you walk down two main streets — one from the 1890s, the other from the 1960s — that show how each age faced challenges from new technologies.
The best space is tucked in the building’s southern end — a big, curving room where the sculptural form of the exterior wall has a palpable presence. A huge triangular window reveals spectacular skyline views while a swinging silver pendulum shows how gravity works. With ceiling ducts and pipes exposed, it’s an extraordinary industrial space. You feel as if you’re in the boiler room of the Titanic.
Unlike that ill-fated vessel, however, the architecture of Isozaki’s ship-like building remains metaphorically afloat. While his poetic concept for a two-faced building has been compromised by the realities of function and budget, the core idea has survived intact. The worlds of science and architecture — as well as this city, which is named for a great discoverer — are the better for it.
