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Rueben H. Fleet Science Center, San
Diego
(And Balboa Park’s December Nights
2003)
By Patrick Totty
Pity the San Diegans. They must live year-round in a narrow temperature range of 60 to 75 degrees F (occasionally suffering the discomfort of 55 or 85-degree anomalies) and endure 10.41 inches of rainfall each winter. They are fated to wait perpetually in vain to experience the romance of snowdrifts, tornados, over-the-top humidity, hail, spring sleet and other seasonal extremes.
To make the best of a bad lot, they console themselves with a
lot of shallow distractions – 70 miles of beaches, a beautiful bay,
easy access to Mexico and one particularly seductive diversion,
1,400-acre Balboa Park, a eucalyptus-scented green lung smack in the
middle of town.
In 1915 the park was the site of the Panama-California
Exposition, a celebration of the recent official opening of the Panama
Canal and an anticipation of its salutatory effects on San Diego’s
port. The city hired architect Bertram Goodhue to design the fair’s
many temporary buildings. Goodhue, whose opus would come to include Park
Avenue’s great Romanesque basilica, St. Bartholemew’s, the state
capitol of Nebraska and the inimitable central library of Los Angeles,
adapted a Spanish Colonial Revival style, whose rich, often baroque
ornamentation was intended to evoke memories of California’s
beginnings as a Spanish colony.
Despite the intention to tear down most of Goodhue’s
buildings once the exposition ended in 1916, San Diegans liked the
structures too much to see them go. So, now massed along the El Prado
walkway, the main lane of the 1915 exposition, are buildings that
started as ephemera but now house most of the city’s major museums.
At the western end of El Prado, in one of Goodhue’s
“temporary” buildings, the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center opened in
1973 as the first Omnimax theater in the U.S. The Omnimax format,
projecting images from extra-large film frames onto the inside of a
large hemisphere, created a crowd-pleasing illusion of three
dimensionality that was perfectly suited to the center’s role as San
Diego’s premier planetarium.
With
Omnimax (later, IMAX), the Fleet Center was off and running as San
Diego’s most popular museum and one of the city’s top 10
attractions. Along with its IMAX theater, the center offers interactive
science exhibits, lectures and guest appearances by notable scientists,
party venues, planetarium shows and children’s programs. Starting
January 31, 2004, the center will present Richard
Scarry’s
Busytown, an English-Spanish exhibit based on the wildly popular toddler
and pre-K books by Richard Scarry that show the marvels of machines and
technology in the workaday world.
During
the Christmas season, Balboa Park offers two nights of free access to
its museums with “Balboa Park December Nights.” This year, more than
80 museums and cultural attractions will open their doors from 5 p.m. to
9 p.m., free, on Friday, December 5, and Saturday, December 6. More than
100,000 locals are expected to take advantage of the offer.
http://www.rhfleet.org/index.html