Science Museum of Virginia

Richmond Times-Dispatch Archives

Published: October 5, 2008

Science Museum of Virginia, 2500 W. Broad Street (next to the Children’s Museum of Richmond), is housed in the former Broad Street Station railroad terminal. Permanent hands-on exhibits focus on such things as aerospace, astronomy, crystals, physics, perception and computers. The museum also has a planetarium and an IMAXDOME, a Foucault pendulum demonstrating Earth’s rotation, the Aluminaut submarine exhibit and the Barbara and William B. Thalhimer Jr. Hall of Science Exploration. The Bioscape life sciences exhibit shows you life sciences and how they affect you on a cellular, human and global scale.

Hours: Memorial Day to Labor Day: Monday-Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 9:30 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Winter hours: Monday-Saturday, 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Call for IMAXDOME show times. Costs: $8-16. Info: 864-1400 or www.smv.org.

ALSO: See the Virginia Aviation Museum, a division of the Science Museum of Virginia.

Broad Street Station (Union Station of Richmond)
Richmond’s Broad Street Station is one of the nation’s last great terminals built during the Golden Age of railroads. It was the result of a competition won by the New York architect John Russell Pope in 1913.

Working in the tradition of McKim, Mead and White, Pope employed a noble and serene classicism that he later used on the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art. Faced with Indiana limestone and dominated by a Tuscan colonnade and a Roman dome, the first use of a dome for a major railroad station, the building was completed in 1919 for the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad Company.
[Credit: Times-Dispatch archives, Virginia Landmarks Register]

Check our photos of ‘Grand Kugel, Earth’

Check our photos of ‘Grand Kugel, Moon’

The Grand Kugel
Already recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest floating-ball sculpture, the 29-ton Tarn granite globe has made headlines across the country.

The Grand Kugel is part of the $1.25 million, privately funded Mary Morton Parsons Earth-Moon sculpture. The sculpture represents the Earth and the moon at a scale of about 1 foot to 1,000 miles. Thanks to a jet of water, the kugel revolves once every 56 seconds and tilts on its axis at 23.4 degrees—just like Earth.

The half-ton moon, carved from Ohio Lord granite, measures 2.3 feet wide and spins 257 feet away.

The original kugel was installed at the Science Museum in January 2003. But a spreading crack in the globe forced officials to shut down the attraction in 2004. In October 2005, it got rolling again with the installation of a new Grand Kugel.
[Credit: Times-Dispatch archives, Virginia Landmarks Register]