Catalyze 2025: John Graydon Smith (MOSI)

We’re asking thought leaders, business people and creatives to talk about the upcoming year and give us catalyzing ideas for making Tampa Bay a better place to live. What should our city look like? What are their hopes, their plans, their problem-solving ideas? This is Catalyze 2025.

Tampa’s nonprofit Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), a center of science and natural history education for young people established in 1982, began to suffer precipitous financial setbacks a decade ago. The largest science naturally expanded and modernized over the years – but more than 80 percent of the exhibits were closed in 2017, as a money-saving measure, as well as the once state-of-the-art IMAX theater on the campus.

John Graydon Smith was brought aboard as CEO two years ago because of his established record of turning around science centers in trouble.

Once he was settled into his new office, he took a good, long, thoughtful look at the towering – and vacant – IMAX building. “It’s one of the most iconic buildings in Tampa,” Smith said. “It’s at the core of our campus. Everybody who drives by on Fowler Avenue looks up and says ‘What is that?’ You can’t not see that building.

“Three years ago, if you Googled our online reviews, the number one thing you’d see was IMAX, IMAX, IMAX. Why did they close the IMAX?’”

MOSI offers STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) classes from preschool to high school, features multiple exhibits both permanent and temporary, and its (admittedly old-school) 42-seat planetarium is always fully booked for public and private groups.

Smith is sure that MOSI will be Tampa’s comeback kid in 2025. Just announced is the transformation of the dormant big-screen theater into the second-largest immersive digital dome theater in the United States (there’s one in New York that’s three feet bigger).

Ten digital projectors, using 8K technology, will plunge visitors (up to 300 at a time) into outer space, under the ocean, anywhere in the known (or unknown world). It is one hundred percent immersive, and far sharper, brighter – and seamless – than the archaic film technology used by IMAX projectors.

(Smith derisively refers to IMAX technology as “entertainment masquerading as education.”)

The screen’s total size – the image appears everywhere you can look in the room – is 10,000 feet. “We’re taking 10 large-scale projectors and seaming them together to create one giant image,” said Smith. “That technology didn’t exist a decade or so ago.

“We can take you anywhere in the night sky, anywhere throughout history. That’s really the beauty of this new system, and the infrastructure we inherited here. Rather than have to build a custom building – designing the shirt around the button, as the saying goes – what we’re able to do is plug this new technology into this building. Knowing that in 10 years, if the technology changes again, we can keep up with the times.”

The Hillsborough County School System has already pledged that every fourth-grader will visit MOSI, and the new dome, on a field trip next year. “What we’re doing now is education that’s also very entertaining,” Smith explained. “We have the opportunity, and the ability, to still do non-educational programming, but at the core of this digital dome theater is education for kids in the greater Tampa Bay area and beyond.”

Smith expects the new dome to debut during the early part of 2025. Total cost for the renovation, which he hopes will include additional classroom space and other desired additions, will be approximately $10 million. Much of that has already been raised through private, public and corporate funding.

“It’s definitely a watershed moment,” Smith said. “It signals, after more than a decade of shrinking and downsizing, MOSI is growing. Expanding.

“As opposed to the expansion of a couple decades ago, I think now we’re doing it more thoughtfully, with lessons learned from prior regimes to say it’s not growth for the sake of growth – and all growth doesn’t need to be square footage growth.”