When Honda invited us down to Long Beach with the promise of an experience representing the intersection of architecture, science, and technology, even the notoriously slow traffic of Los Angeles couldn’t keep us from checking out the newest addition to the Aquarium of the Pacific, Pacific Visions.
Whether day or night, the Pacific Visions glows with blue-tinted luminosity.
Conceived as a state-of-the-art expansion of the original aquarium, the new 29,000-square-foot, two-story wing is an architectural medium for storytelling, presenting the global challenges and proposing solutions in reference to our planet’s most pressing environmental issues. Designed by the San Francisco-based architecture and design firm EHDD, the exterior’s enormous flowing biomorphic mass was created in sum with 800-plus panels of acid-etched glass, each thoughtfully dulled to reduce excessive glare, yet still reflective enough to produce a subtle blue-tinted luminosity across its sinuous length.
The Honda Pacific Visions Theater is a two-story, dynamic digital theater that rumbles with the action, and even mists and emits scents to match what is projected upon its encompassing 32-foot-tall, 180° arc, 130-foot-long digital projection wall that extends down to the floor across a 30-foot-diameter floor projection disc.
Visitors eventually find their way into the Honda Pacific Visions Theater, where a trio of 4K-resolution, 20,000-lumen laser projectors cover the expanse of a 133 f...