Experience

The first thing you see when you enter is how Pittsburgh might have been 300 million years ago, when it was a tropical rainforest. The space is fully surrounded by screens and real plants to immerse you, and the text fades in as you approach. As you walk through, you learn how plants become coal over millions of years.

As you approach the outside of the coal mine, you look down by the plant debris, through the floor down 360 meters to the Pittsburgh coal seam.

Inside the coal mine, you learn about how humans have used and exploited coal and fossil fuels both in Pittsburgh and in general.

Once you exit, you’re met with this timeline on the ground that as you walk forward, you go back in time, seeing the air quality for every year since 1970, and how it’s improved over the years but still isn't ideal.

Turn around, and you get to this microscope area, with samples of different air pollutants for you to learn about, things like like pm2.5 that many people have heard of, but most people don’t really know what they mean or where they come from.

The last piece of the exhibit is the future hallway, with a diorama sustainable green city on one side, populated with some moving trains and plants, and a polluted and smoky city on the other, with moving cars, prompting you to question for you to question, which future do you want to happen?

Physical Model

Created to help understand the space. Constructed out of foam core, paper mache, and paper.