click to enlarge - Ken Picard ©️ Seven Days
- Construction of the new annex
A front loader lifted a hefty wooden crate off the back of an 18-wheeler that was parked in front of the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium in St. Johnsbury. The crate, one of three that arrived last week from a contractor in Spokane Valley, Wash., resembled a prop from an Indiana Jones movie, right down to the stenciled letters painted on its sides.
The crate didn't hold ancient relics but modern, interactive exhibits and hands-on displays bound for the new Tang Science Annex, which opens to the public this Saturday, February 17. It's named for Oscar Tang, a philanthropist and retired financier from New York City who lived in St. Johnsbury as a child and helped fund the project.
"They're here!" announced Adam Kane, the museum's executive director, as the front loader hauled its cargo to the rear of the building, where the annex is located. Just a week from its scheduled opening, the space was still an active construction site buzzing with workers.
More than eight years in the making, the three-level, 6,000-square-foot science annex represents the largest expansion of the museum since its founding. Collector Franklin Fairbanks, a wealthy industrialist who owned Fairbanks Scales, opened the doors to the grand Victorian in 1889 to share with his hometown his worldly cabinet of curiosities — historical artifacts and natural specimens alike.
Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the museum annually hosts more than 11,000 schoolchildren from throughout Vermont and New Hampshire. They come to ogle the towering taxidermy bears, take in the bug art and marvel at guided tours of the cosmos held in the Lyman Spitzer Jr. Planetarium, added in 1961.
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- Kids exploring the Hall of Science
Those core exhibits will stay, but the $7 million annex, paid for with a patchwork of public and private funding, will expand the museum's offerings. Beyond enhanced accessibility — a new elevator and wheelchair ramps throughout — the new space will highlight the two fields of science most closely associated with the Fairbanks Museum: meteorology and astronomy.
Indeed, even if some Vermonters have never set foot inside the stately red stone building in downtown St. Johnsbury, they've probably heard weather reports from the Fairbanks Museum's Eye on the Sky team of meteorologists, and perhaps planetarium director Mark Breen's stargazing radio program on Vermont Public.
The timing of the annex's opening is fortuitous. The museum is gearing up for one of the biggest astronomical events to occur in Vermont in nearly a century: the April 8 solar eclipse.
Because the state expects to hosts tens of thousands of visitors for the eclipse, the Fairbanks Museum has planned a long weekend of events, from an eclipse show in the planetarium to live-streamed NASA video coverage of the eclipse as it crosses North America. A family-friendly event, Sun+Moon+YOU, will use models and interpretive stations to illustrate how and why the eclipse occurs. Kids can craft pinhole viewers to watch the eclipse safely.
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- Original exhibit drawings by David Macaulay
Much of the weekend lineup will be broadcast on Vermont Public. Jane Lindholm, host and executive producer of the network's "But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids," will join Breen to explore the history, science and novel experience of being in the path of totality.
This kind of increasingly visible educational outreach, combined with the new annex, reflects the more modern and interactive philosophy of many 21st-century museums.
"There are some really excellent hands-on science museums not too far from here," said Anna Rubin, director of external relations, referring to such educational centers as the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich and Burlington's ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain. "We wanted to have that same level of excellence for what we do."
During a reporter's tour last week, the whine of skill saws and power drills throughout the annex was slightly distracting but also apropos. When the second-floor outdoor observation deck — aka the Peter Welch Science & Discovery Deck — opens this weekend, it'll feature an exhibit that highlights the physics of sound. This will include a pair of large metallic "whisper dishes" that can amplify and throw hushed voices due to their parabolic shape.
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- A young visitor exploring magnetism with the Ring Launcher display
Another interactive sound display is essentially an oversize phonograph that spins a giant disc on its side. Visitors can hold a card against the disc and, like a phonograph's stylus, play the sounds recorded in its grooves.
"It's so mind-blowing, especially for kids who grew up on digital-only audio," Kane said.
The Tang Science Annex will also feature hands-on lessons in atmospheric and space science, including a display about lightning called a Jacob's ladder, which illustrates the properties of plasma. Another display helps visitors understand how the Coriolis force, which is created by the Earth's rotation, affects weather patterns. Visitors can also build their own experimental wind turbines and discover which designs are the most efficient at generating electricity.
This spring, when the outdoor site work and landscaping are complete, guests can stand in the center of a granite-inlaid sundial and tell the time using their own shadow.
Many of the new exhibits are illustrated with original drawings by Norwich illustrator David Macaulay, who's famous for explainer books for young readers, such as The Way Things Work and Cathedral.
Visitors familiar with the Fairbanks Museum will immediately notice how different the annex looks and feels. Unlike the darker and largely windowless main hall — an intentional design that protects the museum's historic pieces from the sun's damaging ultraviolet rays — the new annex is bright, modern and airy.
click to enlarge - Ken Picard ©️ Seven Days
- The main hall of the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium
While the annex runs the full length of the historic building, it's relatively narrow. As Kane explained, the design had to leave sufficient space to accommodate the weather station behind the museum, which has been used to document weather observations twice a day, by hand, since 1893 — the second-oldest continually operated weather station in the U.S. Had the annex been built too close to the weather station, Kane noted, it would have invalidated its readings.
Fittingly, weather — specifically climate change — was top of mind in the construction of the new wing, which will also house the Community College of Vermont's St. Johnsbury offices and classrooms. The annex is the first mass-timber building ever constructed in Vermont. It uses locally sourced eastern hemlock that has been processed into cross-laminated timber — a state-of-the-art technology that has a significantly smaller carbon footprint than building materials such as steel and concrete.
Construction of the new annex also provided the Fairbanks Museum an opportunity to refresh its entire facility from head to toe. That included masonry repairs to the roof and stone towers, as well as foundation upgrades to better weather the wetter and warmer Vermont climate forecast for the coming decades. Many of these improvements, Kane noted, were funded by the National Park Service and based on meteorological data and climate predictions done by the museum's own staff.
While one eye remains solidly on the sky at the Fairbanks Museum, the other is clearly focused on the future.