Brett Terpeluk with Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Text from Cinnabar website: http://www.cinnabar.com

ìCinnabar conceptualized, designed, fabricated and installed 35,000 square feet of new exhibits in five areas of the Kimball Natural History Museum at the new California Academy of Sciences, a $488 million, 410,000 square foot facility, which is also home to the Steinhart Aquarium and the Morrison Planetarium.

The Kimball Natural History Museum, focuses on two of the most significant and closely-linked scientific issues of our time: the evolution of life on Earth and the continuation thereof. The exhibits draw extensively from the Academy’s 150-plus years of research, its 20 million specimens, and the expertise of its many world-class scientists, to create a multifaceted, content-rich visitor experience. Cinnabar worked extensively with the California Academy of Sciences’ curatorial staff, collections managers, and scientists as well as the Pritzker Prize-winning building architect Renzo Piano to produce an innovative, informative and engaging space.î

Brett Terpelukís Role: As the base building of the California Academy of Sciences was nearing completion, RPBW was contracted to assist in the design and coordination ëkit of partsí flexible exhibit system with design/builder Cinnabar.

Brett assumed a key role in assisting Cinnabar and RPBW in the design, prototyping, and implementation of the system. The carefully engineered ëkit of partsí was designed to allow for a richness of content to be layered on an economical system of cold-rolled steel channels, plywood, steel cables, fabric, and a three-dimensional wire mesh. The design intent was to allow this system to position itself three dimensionally within the pre-ordained base building grid of infrastructural and support point nodes.