Aquarium of the Pacific Opens New Pacific Visions Wing

May 28, 2019

Aquarium of the Pacific Opens New Pacific Visions Wing

Long Beach, California - On Friday, the Aquarium of the Pacific opened the doors to its new Pacific Visions wing. The Aquarium’s largest addition since first opening in 1998, the Pacific Visions wing is the new focal point of the Aquarium, providing facilities that integrate the arts and sciences while offering visitors innovative ways to understand our connections to Earth, the World Ocean, and contemporary scientific research. Clark Construction Group led construction efforts on the 29,000-square-foot facility.

The new wing features a state-of-the-art theater, art galleries, and space for live animal exhibits. Along with increasing the institution’s audience capacity to approximately two million visitors a year, Pacific Visions provides a revitalized front plaza and exhibition hall with space for installations, performances, and cultural events.

Designed by EHDD, the wing’s design evokes the depth, variability, luminosity, and moods of the Pacific Ocean. Complementing the Aquarium’s existing building, Pacific Visions has a unique, bird-friendly glass façade that doubles as a ventilated rain screen, made up of more than 800 non-reflective glass panels covering an area of 18,000 square feet. Each panel is uniquely sized to accommodate the curves and angles of the building’s form.

Inside the wing, the two-story, 300-seat Honda Pacific Visions Theater includes a 32-foot-tall by 130-foot-wide screen, curved in a 180-degree arc, and a 36-foot-wide floor projection disc to immerse visitors in a virtual ocean environment. The unique platform will help tell the story of the ocean, humans’ relationship to our planet, and witness the processes and phenomena of Earth’s ecosystems.

The Pacific Visions wing at the Aquarium of the Pacific is the latest addition to Clark’s portfolio of museum and monument work in the United States. Since first leading excavation operations on the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art in 1916, the company has successfully delivered over 20 cultural attractions of various scope and scale across the county. Clark currently has several active monumental projects under construction, including the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial and the National Air & Space Museum Revitalization. Earlier this year, Clark delivered the International Spy Museum, National Museum of the Army, and National Law Enforcement Museum.

For more information on the new Pacific Visions wing, visit pacificvisions.org.