Serendipity

Architect Ray Murray's 2004 plans were marked out over existing site plan of our grounds

Last year our museum’s planetarium turned 70. Remarkable, considering planetariums as a modern technology are only 100 hundred years old to begin with. How our planetarium got to where it is today is just as remarkable. From our earliest beginnings as a display at the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival in 1952, to our canvas dome at our previous site on  Second Street, to the third-floor planetarium remembered by many, it’s been quite a journey.

This Spitz 512 star projector anchored our planetarium from 1974-2013

The current incarnation of the Koch Planetarium came to be nine years ago. This is the story of how that happened. It is in one sense the story of how our community came together to create something special. It is also a story of serendipity, because it almost never happened.

In May 2000 I had been the director of the planetarium for exactly 15 years. The Museum’s’  planetarium staff, volunteers and I were operating in a planetarium chamber that consisted of circa 1959 everything, which included a solid plaster dome, an entryway that could easily be confused with a broom closet and seating with bolts that were continually loosening from the floor. Also, we used slide projectors. Everything was showing its age.

The old Koch Planetarium on the third floor. Circa 2011.

In an effort to refresh the planetarium, during the late 1990’s, the Museum engaged an Indianapolis firm to complete a feasibility study to renovate our aging planetarium on the third floor. The study, which suggested potential improvements, had a price tag of around a quarter of a million dollars. With the  approval of our Museum’s Science Committee, and cost estimates in hand, we made a formal request was made to our Museum Trustees for funding in 2001. The proposal called for the installation of a new third-floor entryway, restrooms, a slide show automation system and a video star projector. That was an exciting time for the planetarium industry, and I was keenly aware of the rapid developments in planetarium technology that were taking place. After I had several personal meetings with then- Executive Director, Dr. John W. Streetman, III, he  urged me to consider those recommendations as the path forward. It was tempting. He believed that the sum required was reasonable and could, with some effort,  be obtained from our community. It made sense. On one level, something needed to be done. On another level, with proliferation of modern technologies on the horizon, I felt that a renovated planetarium could be obsolete before it ever opened. With the support of our Science Committee, I answered “No we should not proceed with renovations of our existing planetarium.” Instead, I proposed we would be better served with the construction of a new planetarium. As you might suspect, that did not go over very well. A new facility somewhere else on the Museum campus would cost millions of dollars.

Science Experience Specialist, Bruce Hatfield, cleaning the filters on one of our two cinema video projectors

Although sources were investigated between 2001-2003 to fund construction of a new planetarium, little actual progress was made. In a seat-of-the-pants effort to get things moving, I contacted Ray Murray, an architect with 3i Engineering in Evansville, to see if he could prepare a simple rendering for what a new planetarium on the Museum campus might look like. We had serendipitously met when he  stopped by the Museum one Sunday afternoon to deliver his business card and offer his services should we ever need them. I just happened to be staff in charge that day. I wince at the thought of what might not have happened had we never met that day.

Soon, Mr. Murray delivered two sets of drawings, which he had sketched out  at no cost to the Museum. The  plans were widely circulated within our leadership, although I don’t recall exactly to whom I circulated them  or how I did this. The plans  quickly gained traction with our Board President of the time, Tom Bryan. An ad-hoc committee of Trustees and staff were organized soon thereafter to further explore a new planetarium and other physical plant needs of the Museum. Moving deliberately and tentatively, the leadership of the Museum developed  and approved a new master plan in 2006, just two years after the Murray drawings surfaced. The new master plan included the new planetarium and immersive theater as a key component! Ground breaking for our new facility would not take place until many years later, due to a recession in the US economy in 2008, but our Koch Immersive Theater & Planetarium finally opened as the last of five construction phases in February 2014.

The award-winning dome design of our current immersive theater

I’ll be retiring from my post as the George and Dorothy Eykamp Director of Science Experiences in June of this year. It has been quite a journey. I will have worked here for 38-years, two months and 23 days. Upon reflection, my greatest accomplishments have not been mine alone, but collaborations with others. Our current planetarium owes its genesis to one of these collaborations. These two modest renderings created by the 3i architect in 2004 look nothing like what we eventually built, but what plans they were.! Daniel Burnham, the famous architect and city planner once said: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever- growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.” These noble plansjump started a process which culminated in our current planetarium. So to serendipity we owe the existence today of what I feel is the grandest theater of the stars in the state.

Mitch Luman

The George and Dorothy Eykamp Director of Science Experiences