Plans are finally and firmly in place for the Exploration Station near Heuston Station, a science museum with a difference, writes Karlin Lillington

It has had a long gestation, but the long promised children's science and technology centre finally has a proposed location, designs for a building, a director, and an initial €8 million donation from AIB Bank to kick off its corporate fund drive.

"Exploration Station will be a discovery place, where you can learn new things about yourself and the world around you," says the centre's executive director Jane Jerry, who typifies that American ability to be relaxed and friendly yet intensely focused at the same time.

Among Jerry's past museums involvements are directorships of the Rhode Island Children's Museum, the Children's Museum of Houston, Texas, and the Creekwood Botanical Garden and the Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee.

She is anxious to make a distinction between a typical museum - "glass display cases full of things to look at" - and Exploration Station, an "interactive centre" where children (and adults) will learn about science and technology by doing, exploring, and creating things.

"It will all be done in a very welcoming, friendly, interesting, respectful way. This is not going to be a place where you are told about a concept, but an interactive process."

The centre is interested in the intersection between art and science and the creativity of science as well, she says, because science and technology are too often stereotyped as cold, hard sciences - and boring.

Ireland has no other museum - or centre - quite like this proposal, though other countries have found such places to be very popular with children and adults (San Francisco's Exploratorium is considered one of the founding science and technology centres of this type and is a major tourist attraction in its own right).

The centre will be looking for corporate support in some new ways, too. While Jerry is hoping the State's many science and technology companies will give financial support as she starts a drive to raise an additional €7 million minimum, she also hopes that companies with a connection to science and technology will consider donating items for projects, lend expertise, and get involved with the centre's changing exhibits.

"We hear over and over that corporations are intensely concerned about creating interest in science, technology and engineering among young people," Jerry says. "We hope to have financial support from those companies but also volunteer support and companies can also get involved with exhibits."

There are strict guidelines for corporate involvement, however.

Galleries are still in the rough sketch stage, but will be based on themes that can integrate many different aspects of science and technology. Some proposed thematic areas include "Global Explorers" (which would range from exploring the earth, the planets and the sea, and also the social interactions between people and their environment); Building Community (largely engineering); The Time Machine (archaeology), The Body (an opportunity to explore body systems and perhaps the crossover between the physics of building or machine construction and living bodies).

Jerry is eager to dispel any assumption that the centre will target only children. "Children are the primary audience but we want people of all ages to know that you don't have to have a child with you - older people can come and have fun, too," she says.

The centre will also have "docents" - volunteers with expertise who will be available to speak with visitors - along with a staff whose main purpose will be interacting with visitors. Docents are a common feature in American museums but are rare here: among Irish museums, only Limerick's Hunt Museum has a formal docent programme. Jerry says she hopes the docent programme will attract retired teachers, scientists, artists, transition year students, corporate workers and individuals on work placement.

She is delighted with the plans for the building, unveiled last week by the Taoiseach at the Office of Public Works' (OPW) offices. "So many science places are like concrete gymnasiums," she says. In contrast, Exploration Station is intended to be a fluid, curved building full of natural light, meandering galleries, natural wood and roof gardens.

OPW head architect Ciarán O'Connor, who led the design team, says that the OPW already had a semi-derelict site that could be used near Heuston Station and the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in an area referred to as "Heuston Gate".

The 6,600sq m complex will incorporate a glistening white building based on a nautilus shape and designed around the "golden section" or "golden ratio". This is a mathematical ratio that underlies much of the natural world, the base form of construction for everything from a snail's shell to the structure of a crystal, in which a series of rectangles proportionate to others can be generated, one out of the other.

The ancient Greeks based the Parthenon and other buildings on the Golden Section, and it was brought back into architectural discourse by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who believed it allowed his modernist buildings to maintain a human scale.

O'Connor noted at the launch that the building is designed to be a landmark structure in the centre of the development taking place in the Kilmainham/ Heuston Station area. Jerry says she is thrilled with the design, which she believes will be welcoming to visitors and on a comfortable scale for children of all ages.

Jerry has avoided the internal ructions that have beset the project since it was first proposed as a possible museum for Dublin's IFSC. The project went off the Government's radar for several years, then was relaunched in December 2003 by then tánaiste Mary Harney in a press release which said the museum would be open in the Heuston Gate location by 2006. The estimated launch is now 2010.

Jerry says she came to be involved with the project because of her friend and colleague Lou Casagrande, who runs Boston's highly-regarded Children's Museum and is also a member of the Information Station's board of trustees. Taking a break before looking for a new position, Jerry wrote to Casagrande around Christmas time a few years back to ask him to keep an eye out for anything he thought might be of interest to her.

"He wrote back immediately and said, 'What would you think of Dublin?'" The planning group for the centre had visited the Boston museum and spoken to Casagrande, who was very interested in the group, and in Boston's traditional links to Ireland and to Dublin, she says.

Within months she was the new executive director of Exploration Station. She enjoys being in Ireland for the implementation phase of the project and says her role will keep her here through the final hiring phase before the launch. And after? "That certainly would be a joint decision between me and the board," she says with a laugh. "I can say the deeper into it I get, the more excited I get about each phase."