What is the Perot Museum?
The Perot Museum of Nature and Science opened in Dallas, Texas, USA, on 1st December 2012. We believe it’s the next generation of nature and science museums.
Covering 11 storeys and housing 11 galleries and a 3D theatre, the building is a large cube floating over a plinth. It’s designed to inspire awareness of science through an immersive and interactive environment that actively engages visitors.
Conceived by Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects in collaboration with Talley Associates, the plinth is landscaped with an acre of rolling roofscape comprised of rock and native drought-resistant grasses that reflect Texas’s indigenous landscape and demonstrates a living system that will evolve naturally over time.
The cube is rotated several degrees off the city grid, so is visually arresting from a distance. The body of the cube is pierced dramatically by a 150ft (46m) glass prism encasing the building’s 54ft (16m), continuous-flow escalator.
The building’s getting most of the attention, but we’re an institution that’s existed for more than 75 years and we’re continuing our mission of inspiring minds about nature and science.
How do you achieve your mission?
Anywhere you live in the world, the global challenges that are driving our health and economy, such as energy crisis, water challenges or disease, will eventually be solved by science. We want to continue to engage our public by making them more science literate and encourage our children to pursue careers in maths, science, technology, science and engineering. Then they can go out there and become the next Nobel Laureate, or at least thought leaders in their field, and solve many of the problems that our world is currently facing.
To achieve this, we’ve picked 11 galleries in which to tell those stories. Woven into those stories are educational opportunities for people to learn about the different areas of science.
For example, instead of a physics or maths hall, we have a Sports Hall where visitors learn about anatomy, physiology, nutrition, the human body and physics – there are so many science lessons you can teach through sport.
The Being Human Hall focuses on biology and the technology we use to better understand the body and learn about ageing and the brain.
The idea is that people will be drawn into a hall, each of which has between five and 10 disciplines of science. It’s a more integrated sciences approach than other museums. One of the challenges is to make science fun, engaging and interesting. People often think science is something that happens in a lab, but science is everywhere. We’re helping people understand that science is part of their everyday lives.
What’s the content?
The 180,000sq ft (16,720sq m) building has 11 permanent halls; a gallery for temporary exhibitions; six learning lab classrooms; a 3D, high definition theatre; an auditorium; and guest amenities including a café and retail store.
How were the contents sourced?
This is one of the things that we’re excited about with this new level of museum – we’ve levered content expertise from all sorts of people. We had help from Nobel Laureate’s, the local universities’ scientists and appropriate corporation partnerships. For example, for the Texas Instruments Engineering and Innovation Hall, we were able to source content from thought leaders in this sector and leverage that into creating terrific exhibits.
How did you choose the design?
The building is the 12th exhibit. We needed it to be a prime example of where man meets nature, so had a competition to select a designer, rather than the design – that process came later – to ensure we’d be working with someone who completely understood our mission. We picked Thom Mayne because he’s incredibly innovative and inventive. We liked his choice of materials and the fact that he was a professor.
His design was inspired by nature. Different geologic formations are reflected in the pre-cast concrete exterior and the landscape design represents many eco regions around Texas.
The living roof is a one-acre water collection system. We’ve just been called the greenest building in Texas, which supports our environmental aims. Everything about the building represents our mission.
For the interior, we looked at great museums all over the world to get ideas about the type of place we wanted to create. We worked closely with three exhibit design firms – Amaze Design, Paul Bernhard Exhibit Design and Associates and Science Museum of Minnesota – to create this concept.
How is the museum sustainable?
The building is a teaching tool about sustainability. The landscape design, by Talley Associates, serves as an extension of the building design and includes indigenous plant species. It’s integrated with the ground floor lobby and café spaces via the plaza areas, providing a seamless merger between the natural landscape and artificially-made environment of the building.
Other environmental elements include a rainwater collection system filling 50,000-gallon cisterns to supply the irrigation system; solar-powered hot water heating; and material choices emphasising recycled and locally sourced materials. We also built on a former Brownfield site.
We have three green building certifications: LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design); Green Globes; and Sustainable Sites Initiative.
What have been the challenges?
Coordinating everyone could be a challenge at times. We had so many great partners with different and wonderful ways of thinking. Working with all these vendors allowed everyone to push each other’s thinking, which resulted in a tremendous project that came in on budget – and we were actually able to open a little earlier than planned.
Now that we’re open, the challenge is coping with the volume of traffic. It’s more than we’d expected – we’ve had 350,000 visitors since opening on 1st December – so we’re having to adjust our guest service and our operations to make sure we can accommodate that number of visitors and still provide a really positive visitor experience. We can house about 2,000 people at a time and over the course of the day can have up to 10,000 visitors. This can become a challenge when people stay for five or six hours, which some do. However, this is a good problem to have.
How is the museum funded?
The entire US$185m (£122.5m, E145m) was raised privately from individuals and corporations. The museum is named after Margot and Ross Perot, thanks to a $50m (£33.1m, E39m) donation from their five grown up children. The Perots are a long-time family in our community and have been incredibly philanthropic over the years. We had a connective with them in a variety of ways and were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take them to see the Houston Museum of Natural Science. They were excited about envisaging what a science museum could be. Mrs Perot had been a teacher, so has a great appreciation for education, and Mr Perot founded multiple technology companies, so their children felt this was a wonderful way to honour their parents.
We’ve sold out all of our school programmes for the year, so they’ve all been well received. Our first social science evening for adults sold out for 1,500 people in a few days. The sleepovers for kids are also popular.
It’s progressing well because we were able to meet our fundraising challenge for the project a year early.
I believe we’re changing lives and that one day there will be a Nobel Laureate who says they were inspired at the Perot Museum.
