Fewer than a calendar year right after it was declared that DLR Team experienced been tapped by Jacksonville’s Museum of Science and Historical past (MOSH) to design and style its 133,000-sq.-foot new house on the city’s downtown riverfront, a handful of renderings depicting the exterior of the highly anticipated museum have been discovered.
Joining DLR team for the so-referred to as MOSH Genesis Venture is area organization kasper architects + associates and SCAPE.
Motivated by the “movement and stream of h2o,” the design idea of the new museum complex pays homage to its distinguished locale alongside the Northbank of the St. Johns River in the revitalized Jacksonville Shipyards. The building rises from the riverfront by way of a series of terraces with a spiraling circulation ramp connecting the lessen amount to a rooftop terrace that functions a sheltered occasion area and, of training course, offers sweeping sights of downtown Jacksonville and over and above. As observed in a press announcement unveiling the design, this spiral circulation route “fluidly” connects MOSH’s 3 main exhibition spaces: Normal Ecosystem, the Cultural Ecosystem, and the Innovation Ecosystem. People enter the making via a soaring glazed atrium that “provides visibility toward the exhibitions, immersive theaters, and educational areas although also giving a dynamic, gentle-crammed place that attracts persons into the heart of the developing.” The layout, the museum continued, “integrates inside exhibitions with the general public realm by offering exterior house for exhibitions and programming.”
In a assertion MOSH CEO Bruce Bafard heralded the team’s design as currently being “immediately recognizable” and surpassing “what we experienced imagined for the legendary Museum that our neighborhood warrants.”
“This transformational reimagining of the museum reinforces MOSH’s job as a vital civic establishment and a location for available, immersive and technologically innovative activities, though honoring its historic motivation to education,” added Vanessa Kassabian, principal and senior layout leader with DLR Team. “We are thrilled to spouse with MOSH, kasper, and SCAPE to help provide this challenge to the group.”
More style and design facts from DLR Group are forthcoming.
As formerly noted by AN, MOSH—the most preferred museum in Florida’s most populous city—has been positioned at its beloved but getting old present-day facility along the Southbank Riverwalk given that the late 1960s. MOSH was very first chartered as the Jacksonville Children’s Museum in 1941, turning into the Jacksonville Museum of Arts & Sciences in 1977. In 1988, the nonprofit institution was bestowed with its present-day identify following a major expansion and renovation undertaking that included the addition of the Bryan-Gooding Planetarium (previously the Alexander Brest Planetarium). Even with the big late 1980s expansion and subsequent renovations, MOSH has steadily outgrown its 77,000-square-foot household, necessitating an totally new museum making at the Jacksonville Shipyards. A earlier announced $80 million program to further grow and renovate MOSH’s Southbank campus was in the end scrapped, and the relocation scheme was very first announced in Oct 2020.
The $85 million–plus MOSH Genesis venture will empower the museum to “meet the increasing desire for exhibits and packages that inspire innovation” with dedicated areas for exhibitions, events, instructional programming. Early projections have believed that MOSH will be in a position to serve 58,000 students (double the pre-pandemic number) and 469,000 visitors (a 168 p.c increase) annually by transferring into considerably a lot more roomy digs throughout the river.


Jacksonville’s Downtown Spend Authority (DIA) unanimously authorized options for the four-acre museum website on the east side of the Shipyards in January a finalized $1 per calendar year ground lease arrangement is at present currently being ironed out with the metropolis, per the Florida Times-Union. The just-unveiled layout arrives just after 8 months of analyzing the one of a kind riverfront web site and poring about decades of information from local community engagement classes. The design now need to be accredited by the city’s Downtown Growth Assessment Board.
The DLR Group–led style team was selected final August as element of a aggressive, eight-thirty day period-prolonged process spearheaded by the MOSH Board of Trustees and the Genesis Oversight Committee. The two other finalist groups were led by SmithGroup and Grimshaw Architects.
“MOSH will have a dramatic effects on the Jacksonville area, telling its exclusive tale of human and organic history and society, innovation and existing science,” said DLR Group Senior Principal Paul Westlake, who prospects the Omaha-started worldwide structure firm’s Cultural + Executing Arts observe, in a preceding statement. “We are honored to be section of this groundbreaking project and are fortuitous to be associates with each kasper architects and SCAPE. Erik Kasper and his staff amazed us with their layout ethos, awareness of Jacksonville procedures and their deep neighborhood-company attempts. Kate Orff and the SCAPE workforce feel landscape architecture can permit favourable change in communities by regenerating living infrastructure and public landscapes.”

On April 30, MOSH hosted its inaugural GALAXY fundraiser, a bought-out black-tie occasion that generated extra than $500,000 for the MOSH Genesis capital marketing campaign. As noted by the Florida Moments-Union, the museum has raised about $33 million to day for its new $85 million residence even though that determine is anticipated to soar as the initial price estimates have been made again in 2018.
The variety of an exhibition designer is forthcoming.