Thinc

Share the spectacle of biodiversity

The new Steinhart Aquarium is a world-class aquarium at the heart of a striking new twenty-first-century natural history museum. Featuring the largest indoor, living, coral reef ecosystem exhibit in the world, a living rainforest in a 90' sphere, and over two hundred additional living and virtual exhibits, the Aquarium offers its visitors the chance to encounter and explore the spectacular diversity of life on earth.

Planning and Design of Aquarium

50,000 square feet of exhibits

410,000-square-foot facility

Opened in September 2008

San Francisco, California

Thinc Design worked closely with Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa on the design and integration of the major aquarium exhibits into a tightly organized building scheme. The Steinhart Aquarium and the Rainforest Exhibit comprise nearly half of the public exhibition space in the new Academy of Sciences.

Uniquely, all of the major Aquarium exhibits are visible from the main floor of the Museum, where they are carefully cut into the rational, clean architectural scheme. Below ground, at the underwater level of the Aquarium, we created unobstructed views of highly realistic underwater habitats. This sharp contrast of experience, from a controlled, garden like museum environment to an exuberant experience of natural wonder, is one of the hallmarks of the new Academy.

The living World Rainforests exhibit is housed in a 90-foot glass sphere that holds hundreds of living plants, as well as birds, bats, reptiles, fish, and butterflies. The spiraling ramp takes visitors through the multilevel exhibit into the butterfly-filled canopy 28 feet above ground level.

While visitors are able to ascend the spiral ramp to the upper levels of the Rainforest, they take a glass elevator down to the lower Aquarium level to view the Flooded Amazon exhibit. This is a section of the entire Rainforest dome, with the seventy-foot high Flooded Amazon forest to the right and three focus exhibits -- Borneo, Madagascar, and Costa Rica -- on the three floors to the left.

The exhibition is organized this way to show not only the biodiversity and vertical zonation of a single rainforest, but also the extraordinary diversity among rainforest ecosystems in different parts of the world.

The Rainforest in mid-July. All of the plants are growing rapidly and fish have been introduced to the Flooded Amazon tank.

At the lowest level of the Rainforest, an acrylic tunnel offers a view upward through 100,000 gallons of water in the Flooded Amazon exhibit and into the overhanging forest canopy. Rendering from 2005.

The Flooded Amazon exhibit, looking upward from the tunnel into the living forest. Fish have just been introduced into the habitat. The tunnel's elliptical shape maximizes viewing area while preserving a significant water depth overhead.

A rendering of the main view into the Coral Reef exhibit. This 210,000 gallon tank is designed with widely differing views into it that depict different areas of a Philippine coral atoll. This window looks out onto a steep, coral-encrusted reef wall. Its spherical shape allows visitors to feel entirely immersed in the view.

Rendering from 2004.

The main window of the Coral Reef exhibit under construction at Reynolds Polymer in Colorado. Composed of four individual panels bonded together and then polished, the custom shape is over 18 feet high and 35 feet wide. Thinc defined its shape and commissioned an optical analysis before handing final documentation and engineering to the architectural team. Weighing more than 30 tons, the window was shipped over the Rockies in one piece. Its installation was the subject of an episode of the TV series Extreme Engineering.

An early, test fill of the Coral Reef tank with the rockwork nearly complete. After the under-structure was finished, the tank was populated with several tons of live rock, which serve as the substrate for living corals. These are currently being installed in the tank and will grow into a diverse, living reef that will mature over decades.

Thinc worked closely with the Aquarium biologists and consultants David Powell and Charles Delbeek to create this coral wall, a shallow sloping reef, a coral-filled cave and a sand flat with garden eels poking out. This last feature is viewed from a six-foot- diameter hemisphere which is entered through a tunnel.

The Coral Reef exhibit, seen here from the main floor of the Museum, is kept alive by natural sunlight and an array of artificial lighting.

The Coral Reef exhibit, viewed from a third floor bridge. To maximize this tank's size, we cut away the unused, rear portion of the planetarium dome (at right), beneath its sloped seating.

Diver working on the Shallow Reef view of the Philippine Coral Reef habitat. Many corals have been introduced, along with fish, and are growing rapidly.

The view from a third floor bridge overlooking the Philippine Reef Lagoon, which is populated by small sharks, rays, and a sea turtle named Diego.

Main view of the California Coast exhibit. This view is directly beneath that of the previous image.

In Africa Hall, the Academy's colony of penguins have now been introduced into the South African penguin exhibit. The exhibit is modeled after "The Boulders", a beach area near Cape Town.

The Southeastern Cypress Swamp, with one of its two new resident alligators. They arrived, with great fanfare, on August 19.

Exploring the relationship between water and life on earth, The Water Planet exhibition is the intellectual and emotional heart of the new Steinhart Aquarium. Designed in collaboration with Urban A&O, a New York architecture firm specializing in parametric modeling -- and the extraordinary control of complex, fluid design and manufacturing that it enables -- the exhibition's forms capture the essence of moving water.

The Water Planet utilizes living exhibits, projected media, visitor interaction, and the tactile experience of water's many states to tell the story of water's role in supporting life and how life adapts to every condition of water found on our planet.

Once an hour, The Water Planet transforms into a 100-person-capacity theater featuring 360 degrees of video and sound. The first production, opening with the new Steinhart in September, 2008, will explore life's dependence on water. Future productions will focus on themes such as global migrations and life in extreme environments, among others.

Running the length of The Water Planet are three islands that use a combination of living exhibits, flowing water, and interactive media to explore life's adaptations to differing conditions of water. Shown here is the center island, which features African cichlids in a fast-moving stream, Asian koi in a still pool, and jellyfish in a cylindrical tank.

Two media interactives, the Water Imagers, complement the living exhibits. One shows extremes of fast- and slow-moving water, and the other explores different extremes of salinity. Each Water Imager's touch surface allows contact with real water as mist, flowing streams, ice or steam.

The Water Planet, with the first of three interactive islands installed and the show lighting in operation. All of the walls are now in place.