Science Museum of Minnesota

Saint Paul, Minnesota
This Saint Paul center (1978) is so artful an array of science celebration that it reminds me how potentially destructive our two cultures of museology really are. Separating the lure and love of art from science encourages double-entry bookkeeping: art on Sunday in art museums, and technology as usual everywhere else the other six days of the week. A bad bargain.

As you enter the museum you see children climbing around a fey and friendly looking amphibian. Closer inspection reveals that the climbable beast is made of rail spikes. A friendly director, who was bopping around contentedly relishing an S.R.O. Thanksgiving weekend crowd when I arrived, explained that the spikes were local heirlooms from a disused Minnesota railroad. Making a new work of art for child's play from old heirlooms is an apt emblem for this recycler-of-consciousness machine.

It's more than a hands-on museum. It's a bodies-on, kinesthetic, three-ring circus of ideas. Item: To help you understandably enjoy the tradition of masks in human history, they have devised a spookily magical view box into which you look--and find your face enmasked. Mirrors! Item: You don't look at weaving. You get into the threads of it.

Item: You don't look at dioramas about the origins of the universe: you settle back into your tilted, padded chair and watch an OmniMax feature called "Genesis," which is to the old Cinerama what color Polaroids are to dingy old daguerreotypes.

The only places to compete with this emporium of enlightenment are San Francisco's Exploratorium in an abandoned warehouse and Louisville's Museum of Science and Natural History in a recycled cast-iron storefront. All three argue well for the future reintegration of art and science as flip sides of the same human coin of disciplined imagination.

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981