New Museums Enlist Expert in Interactive

Edwin Schlossberg, the museum designer and husband of Caroline Kennedy, will design the exhibits at the new Children’s Museum at Hansen Dam and its sister facility downtown, Mayor Richard Riordan announced Wednesday.

Donning a red hard hat in the sunbaked parking lot where the downtown museum will be built, Riordan praised Schlossberg as a designer with “the knowledge, expertise and a magical touch to fire the imaginations of our kids.”

A tall, white-haired artist and author who married the daughter of the late President Kennedy in 1986, Schlossberg helped create the first interactive children’s museum in Brooklyn in the 1970s.

Like many of his other projects, the hands-on exhibits tried to teach science in an engaging way.

Instead of squirming through a dry lecture on the nature of light, for example, children visiting the museum could scramble through the “Neon Helix People Tube,” marveling as arcs of light shifted from red to violet, and learning how the color spectrum depends on light’s wavelength.

Schlossberg’s New York-based firm, Edwin Schlossberg International, also designed exhibits for the Omaha Children’s Museum and is now working on projects for the new Pope John Paul II Cultural Center and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, both in Washington, D.C.

In Los Angeles, the former Children’s Museum was housed in a 17,000-square-foot space meant for a Japanese restaurant, a “temporary” facility that became its cramped home for 15 years, said Doug Ring, president of the museum’s board.

The facility closed last August so that its operators could turn their attention to the twin births of the 60,000-square-foot museums--one scheduled to open in 2002 at Hansen Dam in Lake View Terrace, the other to debut next to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary near Little Tokyo by 2005.

“This isn’t going to be a didactic science museum,” Schlossberg said, adding that he plans to develop unique exhibits for each site. “We’ll be designing tools for children to try to understand the world.”

At Hansen Dam, the theme will be the environment, while the downtown campus will focus on arts and entertainment.

Particulars, at the moment, remain sketchy. Schlossberg said he has yet to visit the Hansen Dam site, a one-acre parcel at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street, near a planned library and the newly renovated Hansen Dam Recreation Area.

Museum officials have launched a three-year campaign to raise $100 million for the new facilities. So far, they have cobbled together $20 million from government and private sources, including $12 million in city grants, said Sally Thompson, the museum’s chief executive.

The Children’s Museum tapped architect Thom Mayne of the Santa Monica-based Morphosis firm to design the downtown building. Mayne is now working on the Science Center elementary school at Exposition Park.

Officials plan to name the architect for the Hansen Dam campus on Friday.