GREAT LAKES FUTURE
DISCOVERY WORLD AT PIER WISCONSIN
Located in the Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin hand’s on Science Museum, this project is a permanent, interpretive exhibit of the Great Lakes watershed, the region’s greatest natural resource. The program weaves together historic, scientific, and topographic data conveying information such as weather patterns, geological history, animal life, and water movement. The program requires the integration of highly technical life support systems for aquatic and amphibious life, digital imagery, interactive displays, cartography, fossils, and real-time atmospheric data. Describing two ecosystems of the terrain and sky, the design reveals opportunities to explore the intersection between man-made and natural systems-- illuminating the primordial relationship between earth and sky. Moving fluidly within the building’s column grid, the terrain and sky create cinematic views of the landscape beyond. Through a highly iterative design process in form-making and fabrication (marrying both high-tech and primitive technologies), the design mediates between the organic and the man-made, the physical and the atmospheric, the neutral, existing space and the flexible, complex insertion, the grounded and the celestial..