Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center

September 2020Jones Beach State Park Wantagh, NY

What is our future with nature?

Jones Beach is on the ocean side of Long Island. It is an immediately accessible respite for the greater urban community of America’s largest city. The Energy and Nature Center engages visitors in considering the park’s dune and marine life in conjunction with our ability to better support it through smarter uses of energy. Interpretive exhibits built by Moey and designed by AJA Architecture and Tactile Studio, cover 53,500 sf of indoor and outdoor space and include aquaria, touch tanks, an immersive model “smart” home, solar powered interactives, a climbable whale skeleton sculpture, interpreted ADA walking paths, and much more.

How to pour a whale

Outside the Energy and Nature Center visitors can walk across three concrete whale patios to compare the actual sizes of a blue, humpback, and pilot whale. Moey designed and milled the whales’ formwork outlines. Then we pieced the forms together onsite, locking them in place before the concrete pumper filled them in.

How to speckle a seal

We made a lot of animal models for Jones Beach. Most of them are suspended from the ceiling. Their undersides are important. To give our harbor seal its speckled pattern all around we set it across two braces softened with foam to protect its fiberglass body. We also chained it to the ceiling in case it slipped free.


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