Our brand is curiosity: Welcome to Sacramento’s new science museum on the waterfront
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Sacramento’s new science museum
A decade in the planning, the Sacramento region’s SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity will open soon, offering visitors hands-on education in a new version of STEAM: science, technology, engineering, art and math.
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Sacramento is about to become nerdier — in a good way.
A decade in the planning, the region’s awaited SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity will open soon in a former steam-turbine powerhouse, offering visitors hands-on education in a new version of STEAM: science, technology, engineering, art and math.
The planned November unveiling of the $83 million riverfront center comes at a pivotal moment in Sacramento and California history, as the state and region struggle with climate change, water shortages, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. The opening could also provide a jolt to Sacramento’s long struggle to revitalize its riverfront and the formerly industrial landscape north of downtown.
Museum director Michele Wong said the museum’s goal is to nurture an appreciation for science as a problem solver and to stimulate the core human impulse known as curiosity.
“Curiosity is fundamental to scientific discovery and invention,” Wong said.
The 50,000-square-foot museum, known informally as MOSAC, is largely finished, and crews are installing exhibits. The center, designed by Dreyfuss + Blackford Architecture and built by Otto Construction of Sacramento, is a combination rehabilitation project on the old powerhouse and the addition of a new wing, giving the center a stately look, both historic and modern.
It sits just north of Old Sacramento on Jibboom Street, a collection of mostly low-price hotels and gas stations between Interstate 5 and the Sacramento River. The journey to its opening has been drawn out: Over the past two decades, city officials have held numerous ceremonies celebrating the project’s launch and incremental progress toward its funding. Yet until now, the former powerhouse was an empty building, glaringly noticeable to thousands of drivers entering downtown Sacramento every day.
The new museum will replace the much smaller science center on Auburn Boulevard near Del Paso Regional Park. That center has now closed.
What’s inside the museum?
MOSAC’s upstairs and downstairs galleries will house interactive exhibits, each focused on an area of science or technology. Those include health innovations, nature, water, energy and climate, space exploration and astronomy, robotics and engineering.
The center will be more of an “exploratorium” than a museum.
Visitors will be able to strap into a “Mars Walk” gravity harness. They can observe an active beehive from inches away. They can construct their own miniature facsimiles of downtown Sacramento buildings or build robots in a lab. And they will be able to watch films and other shows in the facility’s domed planetarium.
The center plans to offer courses for the public on evenings and weekends. It will rent out space and classrooms for events and will offer a lecture series. Officials hope to train local teachers in science curriculum. The center already has opened its planetarium for shows this summer to 900 schoolchildren participating in educational summer camps.
“We want MOSAC to be a hub of the community,” Wong said.
The nearly finished center will also give a boost to what officials are calling an emerging “museum mile” along the Sacramento River, including the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento, the Sacramento History Museum, the Crocker Art Museum and the California Automobile Museum.
Delta Pick Mello, chair of the Sacramento Area Museums association, said the new science and tech center should help spotlight downtown’s Old Sacramento and waterfront as a place where education and knowledge can mix with other forms of recreation.
“Having a large science and tech museum elevates us all,” Pick Mellow said. “We’re all jazzed.”
Congresswoman Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, a longtime advocate and former science center docent, said the center will promote the kind of innovation Sacramento will need to grow in an economic and sustainable way.
“The MOSAC will ... bring a new frontier of access to science-literacy for everyone,” Matsui said in an email to The Sacramento Bee. “As our economy moves further towards the technologies and innovations of tomorrow, the importance of encouraging excitement over scientific knowledge and training cannot be overstated.
“Since day one, we knew that this project would have a pivotal impact for our region.”
The Sacramento Municipal Utility District has signed on as naming rights partner and a major funding contributor. California State Parks and the city and county governments of Sacramento are also major contributing financial partners, as well as others who support improved science education.
The project site represents an extensive overhaul of a building that was itself a technological marvel when it opened 110 years ago – the long abandoned concrete powerhouse that contained steam-driven turbines used by Pacific Gas & Electric to provide electricity for the region. SMUD is now the county’s purveyor of electricity, taking over decades ago from PG&E.
“It was state of the art in its time, and now it is a state of the art facility again,” said Steven Van Someren, project manager with Otto Construction.
Among the exhibit areas are:
▪ A main room for traveling exhibits and for stage demonstrations. Those could include the human body exhibit and possibly dinosaurs and fossils.
▪ A toddler exploration corral, where parents can let young children vent some steam.
▪ The Destination Space gallery, which includes an interactive “Mars Walk” gravity harness, moon rocks and other items on “curiosity carts” that people will be allowed to handle.
▪ A design lab where older students can build robotic devices and work with 3D printers, laser cutters and electrical circuits.
▪ A health innovations center that will house the prototype of a whole-body PET scanner developed by a UC Davis researcher.
▪ A Building Sacramento exhibit, focused on iconic structures in Sacramento, which will allow visitors to construct versions of those buildings.
▪ A Nature Detectives area for younger students that teaches about the regional flora and fauna. The gallery will include terrariums with insects. One wall will have an active, viewable beehive that bees will access via an opening in the wall on the river side of the building.
▪ A Water Challenge area that shows the technology required to bring water to users in California.
▪ A Powering Change exhibit that looks at the issues and solutions involved in climate change and sustainable living.
This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.