The Marbles Kids Museum and IMAX Theater is a unique public/private partnership between Wake County and a non-profit children's museum. The original museum building is an 80,000 square foot facility developed out of an existing State carpentry warehouse. The museum facility includes exhibit space, meeting/conference rooms, administrative offices, a retail store, and support areas known as Exploris when originally completed. The IMAX Theater is an additional 26,000 square foot building that houses a 300-seat large format theater, exhibit space expansion, and restaurant.
A series of special features was designed to express the mission of the museum. A graphic of the view of earth from space covers the exterior of the large black box exhibit space by using 1.1 million glass marbles held in a stainless steel armature. The "Patterns of Life" column, constructed from custom-designed art glass, expresses natural and man-made systems and is used to draw visitor's attention to the IMAX Theater entry. A map of the world was created out of terrazzo for the center of the museum Global Space.
As the first new significant public building built in a Raleigh Historic District, this project had the additional challenge of expressing itself as a contemporary children's museum, while located in an early 20th century historic area.
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