Ocean View

Jesse Smith’s review of the recently ren­o­vated US National Museum of Nat­ural His­tory points out the meta­mor­pho­sis from stuffy sci­ence insti­tu­tion to mod­ern entity that must “edu­cate with­out bor­ing, elu­ci­date with­out offend­ing, and advo­cate with­out annoy­ing.” For exam­ple, the museum offers no lin­ear pro­gres­sion through the exhibit, but rather any num­ber of nat­ural courses that reflect the chaos of the ocean itself:

Earth’s oceans, we are reminded, form a sin­gle inter­con­nected body of water. Its species and cur­rents are not con­strained by labels such as Atlantic and Pacific, so why should their inter­pre­ta­tion? Sec­tions meld seam­lessly into one another, but infor­ma­tion in each is pre­sented in a con­strained man­ner so that if you do, say, jump from a stuffed pen­guin in Poles to a pre­served Coela­canth (the giant fish con­sid­ered extinct until a fish­er­man found one off the coast of South African in 1938), a vis­i­tor can still learn or expe­ri­ence at each. With the excep­tion of the Jour­ney Through Time exhibit — which explores the slow march of evo­lu­tion that began under­wa­ter — there is never a pro­gres­sion to fol­low, no order by which a vis­i­tor must read or look. In this way, tour­ing the hall feels a lot like surf­ing the Web.